


After the Umbrella was Opened

by the_kav



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 58,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28961076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_kav/pseuds/the_kav
Summary: Set after My Struggle IV.Established Mulder/Scully relationship, and eventual Skinner/Krycek relationship.With Scully stepping down from the FBI to concentrate on her pregnancy and upcoming birth, Mulder finds it hard to work without someone who understands him. Skinner, meanwhile, is having an existential crisis regarding his miraculous recovery after being run over by Monica Reyes and the Smoking Man. When Alex Krycek saunters out of the shadows again, he may be the answer to both their problems.
Relationships: Alex Krycek/Walter Skinner, Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	1. Ghost Adventures

**Ghost Adventures**

**Prologue**

I chose this life for myself. When I discovered the X Files, back in ‘89, I didn’t understand yet what I was looking for. All I had was a vague realization that there was something else, something hidden from us by forces unknown. I chose to leave my promising placement in the Violent Crimes unit back in ’91, and Agent Diana Fowley chose to join me. Together, we reopened the X Files and made it our work to explore the unknown. Fowley chose to leave in ’92, but by then the damage was already done. Due to my choices, she had been exposed to the beginnings of a criminal Conspiracy that went to the very top of our government, involving so many shadowy agencies and men that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of it all.

I don’t know when they got to her. Maybe straight away, with promises of advancement, or the recognition of her skills that had been stripped by her association with me and my work. Maybe it was something as mundane as riches, a comfortable life, a way to survive when the time came that rest of humanity was doomed.

I don’t know.

Scully came next. Another casualty to the choices I have made throughout my life. Drawn in and drawn along, standing with me when her career, her family, her very health was threatened. She lost as much as I did, although through this loss we both found a way to continue on, and with it the type of love and mutual respect that could never be stripped away from us by anyone, much less a Conspiracy that changed and mutated almost daily.

Beyond Scully, more and more people became affected by my choices, from friends to family to co-workers, to those that hunted at the periphery of my work, including my immediate superior Walter Skinner. The man I am looking at now, twisted and broken on an operating table in Our Lady of Sorrows hospital, clinging to a life almost taken by Monica Reyes, and the smoking man who makes us dance as puppets on his cruel, yellowing strings; yet another casualty to the choices I have made. Crushed under a car: an ignoble end to the noble man that sacrificed his own advancement, his own sterling career, to help me in the pursuit of my work.

I didn’t know.

It’s certainly not an apology; it’s barely even an explanation. But in those days of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when I first found the X Files and began to be consumed with the desire to uncover the secrets they hid, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what my obsession would cost, not just to me but to those I loved and respected. All I was searching for, in my extreme naivety, was a way to explain my own loss, the loss of my sister. I didn’t realize that the attempt to resolve this loss would result in even more profound losses, that my choice would lead to a world less-rich in spirit and humanity due to the mistakes I would make; due to the choices I made.

**Act One**

Mulder was dragged from his reverie by a hand slipping into his arm. He forced himself to look away from the viewing window, and away from the body hooked up to so many tubes and wires. His partner, Dana Scully, had appeared by his side. It was her hand slipped into the crook of his arm, her shoulder against his bicep as she leaned into him slightly.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said, her voice low. “They’ve put him into a medically induced coma, and they’re going to operate, to try and relive pressure on his spine, but it really doesn’t look good. He lost so much blood… And even if he does survive, they think he’ll never walk again. His spinal cord is almost totally severed.”

Mulder winced, but acknowledged her words with a silent nod. He went back to studying the figure that lay beyond the glass. The man that would make yet another sacrifice, regardless of whether he lived or died, for the sake of the X Files.

“I wish I could tell him,” Scully continued, her own eyes drawn to the figure. Medical personnel were on the move again. New wires being attached, some being removed, machines being readied for movement when Skinner was transferred to the operating suite, “I wish I could tell him ‘thank you’.” Her eyes began to glaze with tears. “I wish I could tell him everything he means to me. To us. What his support has meant. How he helped us in more ways that he could ever know.”

Mulder nodded again. He felt the same.

“He can’t even hear us now. There’s no time, Mulder. No time left.”

“Don’t think like that,” he replied as soothingly as he could. “There’s always a chance. There’s always hope.”

“He needs a miracle now.”

“Well, get on your knees and start prayin’, Scully.” He tried to give her his trademark sardonic grin, but he didn’t think it reached his eyes. Her words had cut into him. He wanted to apologize, to try and make Skinner understand that he, Mulder, didn’t know that his choices would lead them here, to this place and this time; to try and gain absolution for bringing them all down this path.

Movement inside the hospital room drew their attention away from their own regrets. The medical team had begun to shift the bed, turning it to bring Skinner out on what could be his final journey; to the operating suite that had been prepped just for him. Mulder could feel a lump beginning to form in his throat, and beside him he heard Scully’s breath hitch.

“You should go,” he began to say, as she said “I should go.”

He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back. They shared this final moment together, and then she was gone, bustling after her former co-workers, slipping into the role she played so well: medical doctor; professional agent; advocate for those she loved, for when they couldn’t speak for themselves. The hospital, so used to her and her ways, allowed it, and soon they broke through the swing doors halfway down the corridor, and were gone from sight.

Mulder began to make his way outside. He needed the cool air on his face, to shock him back into some kind of semblance of normality. His emotions had swung all over the place tonight. He’d gone from anger at the Smoking Man for the apparent death of William, to confusion at the knowledge that William had never been his son in the first place, to complete shock at the news that he and Scully were having their own baby, to sublime joy at the idea of being able, at long last, to raise a child with the woman he loved. Then, everything had come crashing down, and the numbness had set in, when they had made their way back to the front of the abandoned factory and made the grisly discovery that Walter Skinner – their gruff, stalwart supporter, the man who had quietly stood up for them, tanking his own career in the process, who had saved their asses more times than they would ever know – was dying alone, crushed under the car that had been driven by Monica Reyes. His blood had spread in to deep coronas that seeped and melded together on the slick concrete.

Blessedly, he had already lost consciousness.

Mulder had stopped, had felt the world take a deep breath and hold it, and when he had come back Scully had already leaped into action. She was on her phone, calling for an ambulance, calling for a helicopter to be ready at the nearest hospital. He needed to be stabilized before being moved to Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, ASAP. Orders given, she began to assess Skinner, trying to call him back to consciousness and force him into fighting for his life. Mulder had been sent to the rusted gates of the factory, to flag down the emergency services and send them to the patient as quickly as possible.

Mulder and Scully had followed the ambulance in Mulder’s car. Skinner’s car, which had brought Scully to the old sugar factory, was now part of a crime scene. When they’d arrived at the local hospital it was to discover that Skinner needed a blood transfusion straight away. The helicopter had arrived shortly after, and while Skinner underwent the procedure it was Scully who bullied the pilot into staying put. Three tense hours later Skinner had been stabilized and was loaded into the helicopter. Scully had stuck with him, while Mulder put his foot down and made it to the airport with minutes to spare, sprinting onto a flight back to DC that had had a no-show, and thus a free seat. He’d had to pay a little extra, and flash his badge to make it happen, but it had happened, and he’d been able to join Scully at Our Lady of Sorrows about an hour or so after the helicopter had arrived.

It had been a frenetic night. A night where his emotions had been all over the place, thrown from one extreme to another at break-neck speed. Nothing had really hit him yet. Everything had been chased by something else, something that caused more powerful emotions to explode within him before he’d had a moment to process the preceding ones.

The elevator doors opened, and yet another situation presented itself. There, standing in the light of the hospital lobby was Jeffery Spender. They’d been in contact with him recently, in an attempt to discover where William was, but hadn’t heard much from him since. It was strange to see him now, out in public. Mulder understood that the man had become a bit of a recluse since his escape from the Conspiracy and their terrible experiments.

His face was more lined than it should have been, still scared from the knives of faceless doctors working with more cruelty than was necessary to secure their own escape from the coming cataclysm. _Yet another victim of my choices_ , Mulder thought. _Poor Spender. He hadn’t known what he was taking on, and although he wouldn’t listen to us, did we ever really try to make him understand? Or did we shrug our shoulders and abandon him to his own youthful arrogance?_

“Agent Mulder,” Spender said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I heard about AD Skinner. I came to see if there was anything I could do.”

Mulder cocked his head. “I wasn’t aware you had a close relationship with Skinner.”

A shadow passed in front of Spender’s face; an involuntary grimace. “I didn’t. But he was still my superior, my boss at one stage, and I respected him enormously, even if I didn’t fully agree with his opinions or actions.”

Mulder relented. “He’s in surgery.”

Spender nodded. He looked infinitely sad. Perhaps, Mulder thought, he too was considering the high cost of their mistakes. _Don’t fret too much: these are on me. All of them, even yours, are just ripples from the impact of my own disastrous choices._

“You want a coffee?” Mulder asked. He found himself amused at the situation, that Spender would travel out here, where his safety and invisibility couldn’t be guaranteed, for the sake of an ex-boss who hadn’t particularly liked him. There was, Mulder realized, a strange softness inside of Jeffery Spender. After all, hadn’t this man spent years as the only holder of the secret of William? He must have had some fortitude if he hadn’t broken, and some measure of loyalty – albeit too late – if he had never tried to sell the secret to save his own hide, or make his day-to-day life as normal and bearable as possible.

“I want a coffee, and then I need some fresh air,” Mulder continued. He nodded his head to a wide, open corridor just off the left-hand-side of the lobby, which led to the hospital’s cafeteria. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup.”

“Hospital coffee. You’re really spoiling me, Mulder.”

Mulder snorted softly at the sarcasm. It released some of the tension between the two men, allowing them to shed their hackles and relax into something more natural. There was still caution, of course. They had both been through enough at the hands of the Conspiracy to know never to trust completely, and in the other’s eyes each had at least one black mark against the other.

But Spender allowed himself to be led. They turned away from the elevator, and away from the glass-fronted sliding doors of the hospital’s entrance, and walked companionably into the large cafeteria, still comfortingly noisy at this late hour.

And thus they missed it.

Unknown to them – their presence within the hospital likewise unknown to him – a ghost from the past strode in. Head slightly ducked, green eyes carefully flashing around, noticing blind-spots, cameras, potential threats, hasty exists. Shoulders within the leather jacket hunching slightly as the ghost ignored the front desk and went straight to the elevators. The ghost stepped into the one Mulder had vacated less than three minutes ago, consulted something on his phone, and made his selection. Had Mulder been there to see it, he would have seen that the ghost had chosen to go to the second floor. Had Mulder been there to see it, he would have realized that the second floor contained the operating room Skinner had been brought to.

Had Mulder been there to see it.

**Act Two**

Twenty minutes later and Mulder was outside. He and Spender had wandered to a bench a short distance away from the entrance, and were sitting in silence as they sipped their too-hot, too-bitter coffee. He glanced at his watch: just after 3 am. It had been a long night, and a longer day. The coffee would barely stave off the exhaustion he felt waiting, crouched behind the numbness. But as the hot liquid burned down his throat and entered his belly he could feel the rest of his body begin to wake up. With it came the feeling of helplessness. He had a vague feeling that he should be doing something; that someone should be paying for what had happened that night. The loss of a child, the loss of a friend and comrade. Granted, William had never been his to begin with – born shortly before Mulder left to seek the truth; adopted without his knowledge; raised by strangers under a strange name; and now, finally, biologically ripped from him by the Smoking Man – but the idea of losing Skinner suddenly seemed overwhelming.

But there was nobody left to pay. The body of Reyes had been recovered at the scene, and now lay in a morgue back on the coast. She would probably never be claimed: Mulder didn’t think there was anyone left to claim her. The Smoking Man he’d killed himself, and this time he hadn’t missed his shot. The old bastard had fallen backwards into the water, and if the bullets didn’t take him the frigid waters would. He would sink without a trace, his body slowly bloating and rotting and becoming food for the fishes. At last the old bastard would gain the importance he had so desperately craved during his long life, unknowingly nourishing the world and the people he had despised and conspired against.

It was a horrible thought. Mulder quickly swore off fish for the next decade or so. It wouldn’t do to accidently, even if unknowingly, ingest that ol’ smokey bastard.

He quietly brought Spender up to speed on what had happened. Spender listened, blank faced and staring straight ahead, until Mulder reached the news of their father’s death.

“He’s really dead?” Spender turned to him. Eyes brows were furrowed and his mouth slightly agape.

“I think so,” Mulder replied. He told that part of the story again, and found that he actually enjoyed the gleeful grin that broke out over Jeffery’s face. It made him seem a little younger, softening the hard scars and breaking through the perpetually hunted look.

Mulder toasted him with his coffee. “Here’s to us.”

Jeffery closed his eyes and leaned back, his face to the uncaring night sky. “Here’s to us,” he murmured.

Mulder stilled, his Styrofoam coffee cup almost touching his lips. Beyond the profile of the relieved Spender, the ghost came out of the hospital. The ghost put its hands in the pockets of its expensive-looking leather jacket, tucked its head down, and headed down the steps.

Mulder forgot to breathe.

“Mulder,” Jeffery said, his voice low and urgent. “What’s wrong? Did something go wrong? Did the old man somehow escape?”

Mulder shook his head. In a dream-like state he stood up and moved back towards the well-lit entrance. Spender followed, still entreating him to answer. But Mulder blocked it out. His attention was on the figure of the ghost as it walked – no, as it _sauntered –_ away. Strutting as though it had no care in the world. Strutting as though its escape from the very bowels of hell – because surely it had been condemned to the most devilish of torments when its cracked and broken soul had been released from its cracked and broken body – had been nothing more than a casual stroll through a beautiful garden.

“It’s Alex Krycek,” he finally managed to say, his voice a whisper.

Fear blossomed, sudden and intrusive. It seemed to come from nowhere. The back of his neck went cold as ghostly fingers abruptly trailed their way up to his hairline. _The old man is dead, but here is another specter, risen to take his place_.

“Where?” Spender was looking around, straining to catch sight of Krycek.

“At the curb. There. See?” Mulder took a few steps forward. His feet propelled him down the first of the steps as Krycek got into an Uber. Then he was running, but the car pulled away from the curb and was gone, the lateness of the hour, and the emptiness of the road, aiding its exit. Mulder reached the curb in time to see it take a right, and then he took off, tearing down to where his own car was haphazardly parked, a ticket tucked in under the windscreen wiper. “Get in!” he called to Spender, who obliged, and together they tore off, making an illegal u-turn in their haste to follow the ghost back to its infernal lair.

They caught sight of the Uber again once they turned right onto the same road. Then, and only then, did Mulder reduce his own speed, hanging back to make it look as though they weren’t shadowing the ghost. It took a direct route through the city center to an area that had benefited from gentrification over the last five or so years. It stopped outside an old townhouse, three stories tall, but thin, and part of a long strip of attached houses. They had formerly been tenement housing, but trendy developers had reclaimed and refurbished them, and now they were houses and apartments for the city’s young professional set.

“Why does everyone have a nicer house than me?” Mulder asked.

“What?” Jeffery frowned at him.

Mulder ignored him and kept driving. He pulled around the next corner and turned off the engine before getting out. Jeffery followed quickly.

“What are we – “

“Ssh,” Mulder said, tersely. He carefully leaned around the corner and watched as the ghost got out of the Uber and mounted the stone steps that led up to the door of the house. It didn’t even glance over its shoulders as it unlocked the door and went inside. The Uber pulled away shortly after, and sped off into the night.

_Alright. So now we know where he’s based. Where his damned coffin is._

Mulder began to think. The clever thing to do would be to call it in, getting back-up before tacking the ghost. In life, it had been a clever creature, and lethal. He could only assume it was the same now, perhaps even more so if it had remained in DC, under their very noses, for God alone knew how long, and Mulder was only armed with a single handgun; his only assistance Jeffery Spender. But there was an urge. The feeling of helplessness that had pervaded his senses before, at being unable to punish anyone on behalf of Skinner, had melted away. Now, he had a target. He could march over there, gain access to the house, and take all his anger out on the ghost that lurked behind the handsome façade of the chic townhouse.

The door reopened. The ghost reappeared. Again, it did not glance around. It simply kept its head down as it went back down the steps and turned left, away from Mulder, and began to walk. Its stride was purposeful, against almost strutting, and Mulder felt an overwhelming surge of rage. It should, at the very least, have had the decency to skulk or limp, sliding from shadow to shadow like the slime it was.

He made a decision.

“I’m going after him.”

“Mulder! For God’s sake! You’re going to get yourself killed!” Jeffery hissed. “You know how dangerous he can be. Call it in. Get the Bureau down here and let them handle it.”

“I’m still an agent,” Mulder replied. “I am the Bureau.” He checked his gun; made sure it was locked and loaded and ready to go. “You coming?”

He moved off before Spender could answer. He could hear the man cursing quietly behind him, and the soft footsteps that followed informed him of Jeffery’s choice. He felt a small measure of admiration for the man. He owed them nothing, not Mulder or Skinner, and yet he still walked into unknown danger.

 _Another victim of my choices._ The thought was fleeting, and for a second Mulder almost sent Spender away. It had suddenly hit him that either one of them could end up under Krycek’s gun that night. But he shook the feeling away – _it will be fine. I’ll make sure nothing happens to Jeffery –_ and continued on, shadowing the ghost as it walked briskly away.

**xxx**

The ghost led them to a tall, towering block of offices. Most of the high-glassed windows were in darkness, with just a few of the rooms behind them still lit up. It was almost 4 am now. Give it another two hours and this building would start to open up, and the workaday bustle would begin again. The ghost skirted the outside of the building, entering into a service door located at the back, near some dumpsters that sat in a small, open courtyard area. Mulder counted to ten before carefully opening the door slowly, to stop it from making any noise that could alert the ghost to their presence, and slipped in behind it.

The ghost was gone.

They were in a parking lot that was almost empty – just a few cars still parked here and there around the wide expanse of concrete, view broken only by a number of concrete pillars – but the ghost was nowhere in sight. Mulder felt his heart begin to beat rapidly as he forced his body to still. He quickly scanned the area, but there was nothing to be seen, and no sounds to be heard.

“Where’d he go?” Jeffery whispered from behind.

Mulder shook his head. “I don’t know. You got a gun?”

“No.”

“Then stay behind me.” He moved forward slowly, edging his way away from the door and into the sudden peril of the carpark. His eyes moved constantly, sweeping around and checking to make sure that nobody was lying in wait behind one of the few cars they could see. He crouched, and made a sweep of the undersides of the cars, trying to spot a pair of legs and booted feet. He edged forward again, peering now at the walls, in case there was a hollow space his prey could somehow use to conceal itself.

He was focused now. Everything was fixed on the hunt.

Which was why he missed the figure that stepped out from behind the closest pillar. He also missed the fist that shot out until it connected with the back of his shoulders.

 _“God damn it!”_ He heard a familiar voice shout, almost drowning Spender’s cry of warning.

Mulder ignored the ache that spread over the top of his back and turned, his own fist striking out and connecting with Krycek’s side. The man grunted, absorbed the blow with a grimace, and managed to pop Mulder a good one in the side of the face. His ear now ringing, Mulder fought back, gun forgotten as he focused on landing as many punches as he could. It seemed that Krycek also forgot his own gun, the lethal looking weapon clenched in his right fist, as he threw himself into the physical fight. He connected solidly with Mulder, closing the distance between those swinging fists, and they both fell. Mulder landed hard on the concrete but ignored it, pushing against Krycek’s face with his left hand before viciously elbowing the man’s right hand. The gun fell, clattering against the ground as it spun away.

Krycek wrapped both hands around Mulder’s throat and began to squeeze. In response, Mulder’s scrabbling left hand made hooked claws of his fingers, and he went for Krcyek’s eyes. Krycek cried out and pulled back a little, trying to get out of reach and save his eyeballs. As soon as he did, Mulder planted his feet on the man’s chest and _heaved,_ muscles straining in his calves. Krycek flew back, but they were both on their feet in seconds, facing off against each other, glaring at one another in anger.

Mulder raised his gun and pointed it at Krycek’s chest. “Game over.”

“You son of a bitch,” Krycek spat.

From the corner of his eye, Mulder could see Spender retrieve Krycek’s gun. He could only hope that Krycek was, truly, disarmed.

_Armed. Arm. He has both arms._

Mulder spared a glance down to Krycek’s arm, and could see that it was true. Both the man’s fists were balling convulsively, as though he was itching to wrap them back around Mulder’s throat again.

“I see you’ve grown a limb back,” Mulder said. “Strange. I didn’t think rats could do that, only lizards.”

“Go to hell.”

“No, seriously, Alex, how’d you manage that trick?”

Krycek’s eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth pulled into a snarl. _“Go to hell,”_ he hissed again.

“I’m going to kill you anyway, Krycek. You sure you want those to be your last words?”

“Do it. _Do it._ You just make sure you do it right this time, and burn the damned body afterwards.”

Krycek straightened up and faced Mulder without a hint of fear or pleading on his face. His eyes burned feverishly. _“Do it,”_ he whispered again. He took a step forward, towards Mulder, as though taunting him. “Go on, coward, do it.”

Mulder felt the insult stoke the fire of anger that sat in his belly. For a moment he could see it so clearly: squeezing the trigger; the body falling to the floor; hauling it to an incinerator and watching it burn. Watching as any hope of resurrection was removed.

“No,” he said at last. “I think I’d much prefer to see you stand trial for your crimes.”

“B.S.,” Krycek said. Another step forward. The cockiness back as he challenged Mulder. “You wanna see me die. You know you do. You just lack the damn courage to do it. Saint Fox. Take me in, get your commendation and your praise, then sit back and let someone else pull the trigger. That’s how you work. There’s just as much blood on your hands as there is on mine.”

“Nobody has as much blood on their hands as you do.”

“That’s a lie. We all do. Every last one of us. Even the choirboy over there.” He inclined his head in Spender’s direction.

“How’d you figure?”

“Inaction.” Krycek turned his piercing gaze on Spender now, looking him in the eyes and pinning him there. “You sat and did nothing, assured by your own arrogance and your perceived superior intelligence – ‘Oh, Mulder couldn’t possibly be right; the X Files have to be nonsense, they can’t possibly exist’ – and through that inaction, through that conceited attitude of greatness, you allowed them to continue unimpeded. You allowed more people to die; more lives destroyed. You’re both as bad as me. The only difference is, I don’t pretend to be better than you.”

Spender shook his head. “You’re wrong.”

“Don’t listen to him, Jeffery,” Mulder said. “He’s trying to get inside your head.”

“Then why did you give up the X Files?” Krycek asked. “Why did you insist on Mulder being reinstated and taking them back? Why ask to be assigned to a different project? Was it because you were happy with your performance? You thought you were doing a good job? Or because you’d realized the truth? That your own inaction and arrogance had allowed more lives to be destroyed than I could ever achieve?”

“Shut up, Krycek,” Mulder warned.

“Blow me.” Krycek turned back to Mulder. He walked forward, until the barrel of the gun rested against his chest. “Now pull the damned trigger. Do it.” He finally roared it. _“Do it!”_

“Back up, Krycek, I’m warning you.” Mulder pushed against him with the gun. “You know I’ll do it.”

“Good! Do it! But you better do it right this time or I swear to God I’ll come for you.”

“What the hell happened to you?”

“You know what happened to me,” Krycek snarled. “My body was picked up from that parking lot by those sons of bitches, and brought back to one of their God forsaken facilities.”

“But you were dead.”

“Not quite. Brain activity wasn’t all gone. Just enough left to hook me into machines and start a new round of experiments. Pain, Mulder, beyond anything I’ve ever felt before. Healing me. Destroying me. Pushing me to the limit of what a human could endure, then shoving me over the edge for the hell of it. Time and time again. Almost realizing who I was, almost waking, always in pain. Learning how to live, locked inside my own husk of a body, wires everywhere, completely immobile… Learning how to send my mind outside of my body, to escape the pain.”

“That was you, wasn’t it? When I was on trial? When I was inside Mount Weather. That was your ghost?”

“No, that was my _soul,_ Mulder, my spirit. Still trying to help your stupid ass. Hoping that once you were free you’d continue on your quest, find me, and pull the damn plug. But no, not you.” Krycek cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. “You were given all the tools and what did you do? You gave up. You just stopped. You retreated from the world and sat on your ass, surrounded by clippings of your past glories while the world kept turning, and more people died. Unfortunately not me among them.

“Five years, Mulder. Five God- _damned_ years I spent like that.” Krycek’s voice dropped to a growl. “Five years before I could fight off their drugs and regain some sense of myself. Five years waiting to escape. Another two years hiding in the darkness, trying to heal my mind, trying to get rid of the pain they’d left me with. Finally you came out of hiding, while I was still cowering in the dark. Finally they dropped all charges against you, the Teflon man, and gave you permission to continue. And what did you do?”

Mulder shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The priest, Mulder,” Krycek spat. “The missing women. Alright, fine, they died, but what you uncovered, what you stopped, was enough to force the FBI to put you back on the X Files. But what did you do? Hmm? The great crusader? You clung to your conspiracies about aliens. You clung to the idea of saving the world, saving humanity in the future, without giving a damn what was happening to it now!”

“It wasn’t that simple.”

“Yes it was!” Krycek’s voice rose. “Yes, Mulder, it was incredibly simple! Right then, on this world, under your nose, under the noses of every person, that old bastard was back and working to restart his Conspiracy. _Untold. People,_ Mulder. Untold, because you didn’t care enough to find them, and tell their stories.”

“It wasn’t my responsibility!” Mulder found himself matching Krycek’s loud accusations, raising his own voice to try and stem the tide of vitriol that was threatening to engulf him.

“You appointed yourself the defender of the world, Mulder! You decided that this was your role! Who the hell else’s job was it?!”

Mulder shook his head. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Yes.” Krycek’s voice sank back to a whisper. “Yes, it was. You had a choice. You could have kept going, and tried to make a difference to the people whose lives were torn apart by the old man. By his new organization, his new Conspiracy. But you turned away from them. You sat and read and researched and dug for answers about aliens in far-off worlds, in the hopes that someday it could make a difference here, when in reality you could have been the difference you wanted to see. You could have acted.”

Mulder felt like he couldn’t breathe. His head swam. _This isn’t true. This isn’t true._

 _Nugenics Technology,_ his brain reminded him. _Augustus Goldman had been developing that technology for at least a decade, probably more. Those children were being experimented on for their whole lives, since before they were born when their mothers were subjected to experiments. So many dead, so many died in extreme pain, for the sake of advancing The Project._

_The Spartan Virus. Developed from earlier attempts to release smallpox back into the world, via honey bees. How long had the old man been working on this new attempt? How many scientists were working with him? Which arms of the military were providing support?_

_Titanpointe. Project Blarney. Developed when Langly was still alive. He’d died in 2002, Jesus, 19 years ago now. Titanpointe had been in operation, working on that project for at least two decades, again probably more years than that. How many people had died for that? What had begun as an idealistic way to create a digital heaven had resulted in virtual slavery for the great minds that had conceived it. They probably still existed to this day, locked within a gilded cage policed by ruthless people._

He dropped the gun. It flipped, and dangled from his finger by the trigger guard. He pushed it against Krycek’s chest again, gently this time. “Take it,” he said. “If you want to die, I won’t be a part of it.”

“Mulder what the hell are you doing?” Spender hissed.

“He’s right.” Mulder’s voice was toneless. _Choices, choices, and still I keep making the wrong ones. Still I keep condemning others due to my own poor choices._

Krycek took the gun. He stepped back a few paces, then swiftly brought it up, pointing it squarely at Mulder. “I’m not doing it again,” he said quietly.

“Alex, what the hell are you doing?” Spender brought Krycek’s discarded gun up, and pointed it at its former owner.

“I’m not going back,” Krycek said, keeping his eyes on Mulder. “I’m out of it now, and I’m staying out. I won’t go back.”

“Then walk away,” Mulder advised.

“The hell I will! Not with you walking straight after me.”

“I won’t.” The promise came so quickly Mulder wondered if he knew it was a lie.

“Alex, drop the gun,” Spender pleaded.

“Shut up, Jeff,” Krycek warned. “You know what it’s like. Every time this man comes into my life, every time he crosses my path, my life goes to hell. I am not getting dragged back into it.” His finger tightened on the trigger. Mulder had time to catch a breath before two gunshots rang out in quick succession.

Spender had shot Krycek in the arm. The sudden bloom of pain had made Krycek’s whole body flinch, the result being that he, too, pulled the trigger while the gun danced in time to his own injury, shooting Mulder in the arm. They both dropped instinctively, grabbing their wounds.

“Jesus freaking Christ, Jeffery!” Krycek cried. “What the hell, man?”

“Oh my God,” Mulder moaned. “You shot me, you son of a bitch!”

“My left arm! Are you freaking kidding me?”

“Oh my God, this hurts so much!”

“Real original, Jeffery!”

And suddenly Krycek was laughing. He sat, dazed looking, the gun fallen to the ground beside him, forgotten, clutching his left arm, and began to laugh like a lunatic. Somehow, despite everything, Mulder found himself joining in.

“Been a while since you got shot in a parking lot, huh?”

“Yeah it’s something I try to avoid these days. Is this karma? Or synchronicity?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s just a dumb move on little Jeffery’s part,” Mulder said, before the laughter took them over again.

“We better get you both to the hospital,” Spender said, ignoring their laughter.

“Did either one of you bring a car?” Krycek asked. “Or are we walking? I don’t think they’ll let us bleed in the back of an Uber.”

**Act Three**

Mulder refused to watch as the doctor stitched him up. Krycek, he realized, had no problem with it. He was taking a keen interest as a second doctor had numbed the area, dug out the bullet, and begun the stitching. Jeffery had retreated to the door, an attempt to give both men a little bit of privacy.

“So what the hell are you doing in Washington?” Mulder asked at last.

Krycek kept his eyes on his wound, and shrugged his right shoulder. “Living,” he said at last. He glanced over at Mulder, then back to the minor surgery being performed on his arm. “I figured… why not? At least here, I’ll know before they find me. If they find me. You should see where I live, man. It isn’t exactly conducive of secret operations, if they decide to come for me.”

“What do you mean?”

Krycek looked back at him, grinning like a shark. “Everyone’s got a camera these days, built right into their phones. And everyone’s on the lookout for a video that will go viral and make them famous. Not to mention nobody’s afraid of the law, or the government, anymore. They come for me then it’s going to be violent, and every single person on that street will make them famous.”

Mulder snorted. “You got it all figured out, huh?”

“Hide in plain sight, Mulder, and let them waste time searching the darkness for you.”

The doctors finished up and left, with warnings to the men to stop playing stupid games with guns. Krycek grinned at them, entirely unabashed, and thanked them for their time.

“Why’d you tell them the truth?” Spender groused. “You made me look like an idiot.”

“They didn’t believe that!” Krycek laughed. “Are you kidding me? Three grown-ass men in a three-way Mexican stand-off? Gimmie a break.” He tossed a mock-coy look at Mulder. “They probably think it was a sex thing.”

Mulder found himself laughing again. “Shut up, Alex.”

“Well, boys, it’s been fun,” Krycek said as he hopped down from the gurney and grabbed his discarded jacket. “It’s been a long time since I got shot at by you jerks. It’s almost made me nostalgic for the good old days.”

“You just walking out of here?” Mulder asked. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. Should he let Krycek go? Could he trust him when he said he was out of the game, and had no desire to get back into it? Or was it all just another elaborate lie, a pantomime from one of the best actors to never walk the stage?

“You know it,” Krycek said agreeably. “Time to back to my hole and rest my new bullet wound. Surprisingly, I think I’ll adapt to not using my left arm for the next couple of days remarkably well.” He almost had his jacket on, was just pulling it carefully over his left arm, when he suddenly stilled, head turned towards the window. He quickly moved back and out of sight of the window, and the jocular attitude was replaced by one of stealthy lethality. “We’re being watched,” he said softly. He turned to Mulder, and Mulder could see by his eyes that he wasn’t lying about this.

“Where?” Mulder got down from his own gurney and moved to join him beside the window.

“Careful. You see the third, fourth, fifth window? On the floor below us?”

Mulder carefully inched his face towards the window, to see what Krycek was talking about. The building they were in was L shaped, and their room faced a side of the L, like the inside of a ninety-degree angle. And there, as Krycek had said, was a figure of a man in the fifth window, on the floor below theirs, standing still and watching their room.

Spender joined them. “There’s another one,” he said. “Further down, the seventh window. He’s facing the first man. Now he’s turning. He’s looking this way too.”

“Still got my gun, Jeff?” Krycek asked.

Spender nodded.

“Good. Go down there and see who it is.”

“On my own?” Spender sounded incredulous. “The hell I will!”

“Well, you shot us both, so we’re useless!”

“I did not shoot Mulder! You shot him!”

“Uh, and _why_ exactly did I shoot him?”

“Shut up, Alex!”

“Because you shot me!”

“I’ll go,” Mulder said. “Alex, back me up. Jeffery, you stay here. I’m going to call you. You keep your eyes on those men, and tell us if they move. You understand?”

“Alright, give me back my gun.” Krycek held his hand out to Spender, who hesitated. “C’mon, man, how the hell am I supposed to back Mulder up without a gun? What am I using here? Harsh words? Gimmie back my gun!”

Spender rolled his eyes, but did so, and Mulder and Krycek left the room, trying to stay out of sight of the window, so as not to announce their intentions to their watchers. They quickly made their way down the hall, and into the second wing. They tried to call the first elevator they came to, but for some reason the buttons for the floors below them were disabled: all they could do was go up.

“The stairs,” Mulder said, so they made their way to them, and went down as quietly as they could, guns out and held ready, exiting into a long, dark corridor that had an unused air to it. Clear tarpaulin covered the sparse furniture, and the floor was littered with the tools of decorators: step ladders, paint cans, rollers and brushes. Krycek ducked into the first room on their right – the side that faced their room – and counted two windows. Mulder took the next room: one more. One window in the room after that. They moved even slower now, positioning themselves beside the next door.

Mulder silently counted down from three, then burst in the door, Krycek on his tail. They moved quickly to secure the room.

It was long, like an old ward, but empty. There was the fifth, sixth and seventh windows, but there were no men standing anywhere inside the room.

Mulder quickly dialed Spender’s number. “Where’d they go?” he asked, as soon as it was answered, quickly putting Spender on speaker phone.

“What are you talking about? They’re standing right there. They’re looking at you.”

Mulder looked at Krycek, who’s face lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning.

“No freaking way! Ghosts? Seriously, Jeff, you can still see them?”

“You’re standing right beside one of them!”

Krycek slid his gun into the top of his jeans and took out his phone. He aimed the camera and starting taking pictures. The light of the flash strobed quickly a number of times.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mulder asked.

“Photo bursts. You know, when your camera takes, like, twenty or so pictures in a row right after each other?”

“Yeah. I haven’t exactly had good results with those kinds of apps.”

“Talk to me, Jeffery, tell me where they are!”

“They’re gone,” Jeffery replied. “They disappeared when the room started lighting up. What caused those flashes?”

“My phone.” Krycek turned back to Mulder. “What now? Hey, Jeff, did you see where they went to?”

“No, they flat out disappeared.”

“We can go on,” Mulder said. “What do you say, Alex, you up for a little ghost hunting?”

“Damn right. Aliens are so passé, Mulder: ghosts is where it’s at these days.”

“You still there Spender?” Mulder said into his phone.

“Still here.”

“Go find Scully and get her flashlight, then meet us over here.”

“What? No, I’m not doing that.”

“Why not?”

“Scared much?” Alex said scornfully. “C’mon, Jeffy, come play with us.”

“For ever, and ever, and ever,” Mulder whispered in a creepy voice that left Krycek snorting with laughter.

**xxx**

It took some more bullying, but Spender eventually appeared, complete with Scully’s flashlight. “She seemed really annoyed,” he announced. “She also wanted me to tell you – there’s something you should know, Mulder.”

“Is AD Skinner still alive?”

“Yes, I mean, of course. It’s remarkable – “

“The it’ll hold for a few more minutes.”

“But – “

“Later, Spender. Come on. Alex is _dying_ to find the ghosts.”

“Not funny, Mulder, not funny at all.”

They went back out into the corridor and started down it, towards the end furthest from where they had entered. They moved as quietly as they could, listening intently. They were about two thirds of the way down when Mulder hissed at them to stop, cocked his head, and adopted a listening attitude. Faintly, they heard footsteps echoing somewhere almost ahead of them.

“You hear that?” Mulder asked.

“I hear it. Downstairs?” Krycek asked.

Mulder shook his head. “I think it might be on some stairs.”

“Getting fainter.”

“Moving down, for sure.”

“There must be stairs up ahead.”

“All I can see is the elevator. Want me to try it?”

“Go ahead, but I don’t think it’ll work.”

Spender hung back as Krycek and Mulder approached the end of the corridor. Mulder tried hitting a few buttons on the panel beside the elevator doors, but eventually drew back and shook his head.

“Doors won’t even open,” he said.

“Must be out of commission while this floor is getting renovated.”

“What’s below us?” Spender asked.

Mulder shrugged, but Krycek pulled out his phone. He had downloaded the floorplans of the hospital earlier this evening, before he had made his initial visit. He thumbed down through the print-screens he had taken, then shrugged. “This whole section, from this floor down, is out of commission, full stop. This ward appears to have been a children’s ward, below was a general ward, then the ground floor – or maybe it’s a basement level? I can’t tell from this – was a psychiatric ward. Adults and ‘youths’, whatever that means.”

Mulder shook his head. “Maybe older teens?”

“Maybe. Scully ever tell you any spooky stories about this place?”

“No, she never really talked about it at all. Besides, she only started working here when she left me.”

“Oh, she dumped your ass? Good for her.”

“We’re back together.”

“Hang on to her, man: she’s out of your league and you’ll never do better.”

“Thanks, asshole.”

“No problem, douchebag.”

“You guys wanna shut the hell up?” Spender cut in, his voice exasperated. “There’s nothing down here. There’s no sign of anyone, living or dead,” he added pointedly.

As if on cue, a faint _bang_ echoed from below them, making them all jump. Jeffery groaned. “Let’s just go!”

“Hell no!” Krycek was grinning again. “You go back if you want to, but I’m going on. Mulder?”

Mulder hesitated for a split second, before nodding. “We go down.” He pushed open the doors that stood in the wall beside the elevator, and went through, Krycek following closely behind. Spender groaned again before hesitantly going after them. He had considered simply leaving them to it, but one glance back up the deserted corridor behind them, discarded furniture and folds in their coverings shrouded in shadows, made his stomach churn nastily. He didn’t think he had the strength to go back by himself: it felt as though the empty rooms and glass-paneled doors were watching him, waiting until he was alone before they struck.

They came out at the floor below, but a quick reconnaissance up and down the corridor was enough to ascertain that the bang had come from the bottom floor: all the doors here stood open, and there was even less furniture, none of which had fallen or lay askew. The dust had settled thickly, and had not been disturbed. Mulder pointed down, silently. Krycek nodded, and once again they went back into the stairwell and headed downwards.

This final floor was as silent as the grave. The air, which had lain heavily on the floors above, became almost oppressive in its stillness. They were moving slower now, and unconsciously keeping together in a tighter group as they moved deeper along the corridor, their eyes searching everywhere.

Krycek still held his phone up, occasionally taking bursts of photographs. “Should we do some EVPs?”

“Sure,” Mulder said, although he didn’t sound too certain. “That’s electronic voice phenomena,” he added over his shoulder, for Spender’s benefit.

“I know,” Spender said, slightly insulted at the idea that he wouldn’t. “I worked the X Files too, Fox. I read the same files as you, even if I didn’t believe them at the time.”

“That’s you told,” Krycek murmured. “You got a voice recorder on your phone? I don’t want to get out of the camera on mine, in case we need to take pictures fast. Man, we should have come with better equipment.”

“You have ghost hunting equipment?” Mulder asked, pleasantly surprised.

“Sure, of course. I told you, Mulder: Aliens is played out, it’s all about the ghost hunting now.”

“So you believe in life after death?” Mulder asked, as he called up the voice recorder app on his phone.

“Why not?”

“I thought you once said you were an atheist.”

“No, I said there is no God. But there’s too many stories about ghosts, and the afterlife, to discount them out of hand. And I’ve seen so much in my life to know that it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.”

“What about… Say, sasquatch?”

“Naw, I don’t believe in sasquatches.”

“What?! Why not?”

“Look, deforestation and destruction of wild-lands” –

“Guys, seriously?” Spender said, cutting into their discussion. “Can we just finish up and get out of here? Go do your EVPs and let’s go!”

Mulder and Krycek rolled their eyes at each other. Mulder, however, held out his phone and began to ask questions.

“Is there anyone here?” Pause. “Can you tell us your name?” Pause. “Can you tell us why you’re here?” Pause. “Can you tell us how you died?” Pause.

“You want to review it now?” Krycek murmured.

Mulder shrugged. “Might as well.” He stopped recording and hit play back. His own voice came out, loud and clear, and thought they both huddled against the phone, listening intently, they could hear no answers to the questions.

“Wait, shh!” Krycek suddenly hissed. Mulder hit pause on the playback of the recording, and instantly heard what Alex did: more footsteps. Ahead of them, shuffling softly, less defined than the ones they heard upstairs. They both moved forward, making confidently towards the end of the corridor, beside the handsome old nurse’s desk that stood near the elevator. The doors, like the ones on the floor above, were all still open around them.

Mulder held out his phone once again, while beside him Krycek started taking more bursts of photographs, centering the images on the space where they believed the footsteps had come from.

Mulder began to speak, as before. “Is there anyone here?” Pause. “Can you tell us your name?” Pause. “Can you tell us why you’re here?” Pause. “Can you tell us how you died?” Pause.

“Playback,” Krycek whispered when they had left enough space after the last question. Mulder nodded and hit ‘play’. Again, they huddled around the phone, with Spender hanging back very slightly, and listened.

“There!” Mulder said triumphantly. “Did you hear that?” He rewound the recording and hit play again. _“Can you tell us why you’re here?”_ followed by a faint voice.

“I can’t make it out,” Krycek said. “Play it again.”

“It sounds like… It almost sounds like a woman’s voice.”

“I think so. Is it saying a name? Beth?”

“No, it sounds more like ‘death’, I think. Play it back again.”

“’Death’. I think you’re right. ‘Why are you here? Death’.”

“Yikes. Ok, keep going. She might have answered the last question, how she died.”

“I want to try and get a name, afterwards.”

“Good idea.”

At that moment, the door to their right slammed shut. They all jumped, but Jeffery, standing behind the other two, reached out and grabbed their arms in shock, accidentally squeezing their bullet wounds.

_“Jesus, Jeffery!”_

_“What the hell, man!”_

“Holy cow, you gotta do that to us?” They turned to him, incredulous, but he wasn’t looking at them. His eyes were trained on the shut door. They both followed his gaze.

“Is there a breeze down here?” Krycek asked.

“I don’t see how there can be,” Mulder answered. “Not at this end of the corridor. It’s completely still.”

Beside the nurse’s desk, the elevator suddenly whirred into life. They all turned their heads, eyes trained on it, and watched the floor levels above their head light up and count down.

It seemed to take forever. _Four. Three. Two. One._

Krycek raised his phone and flashes from his camera broke the gloom around them as the doors to the elevator slid open.

Scully stepped out, and glared at them. “What the hell are you doing down here?” She pointed at Krycek. “What the hell is he doing here? Why isn’t he in custody?”

Krycek and Mulder let out noisy breaths as the tension broke, then turned back to the slammed door. “Better check it out,” Mulder said.

“Better had,” Krycek agreed. He let Mulder grasp the door handle, hanging back with his phone’s camera pointed at the door. He began taking photo bursts as Mulder swung the door open. They both went in, accompanied by more photo bursts, but the room beyond was disappointingly empty: there was no furniture remaining; the windows were covered up with heavy curtains; no lightbulbs hung from the empty fittings. There wasn’t even a hint of Satanic graffiti on the old, peeling walls.

They looked at each other, disappointed.

“I guess that’s it,” Krycek said. “End of the ghost hunt.”

“We can always try another round of EVPs,” Mulder offered.

It looked as though Krycek was on the verge of agreeing, but before he could answer Scully called, “Mulder!” in a sharp, annoyed voice. They stepped back into the corridor, and she gestured to the elevator. “You guys shouldn’t even be down here. The whole place is shut down and waiting to be renovated.”

“How’d you get the elevator to work?” Spender asked. “It wouldn’t work for us.”

She held up a skeleton key and let it dangle from its fob. “I used to work here. Now come on, get out of here.”

They stepped into the elevator with her. She made no attempt to cover her dislike of Krycek, making sure he noticed how she moved to the furthest place away from him. He didn’t seem to care though. Instead, he started going through the photographs on his phone. Mulder leaned in to take a look too, and together they searched through the images for any evidence of their elusive ghosts.

“That could be something,” Mulder murmured.

Alex nodded. “Some kind of mist. It’s not in the one before it, or after it. Look.”

Mulder nodded. “Can you send me that.”

“Sure. You got your Bluetooth on?”

 _“Mulder!”_ Scully hissed again. She shot her eyes at Krycek, who was too busy with his phone to notice. Mulder shrugged helplessly as an apology. It was natural for Scully to hate Alex Krycek, he knew. After all, Krycek had been present when her sister, Melissa, had been murdered. He may not have pulled the trigger himself, but he was at the very least an accessory to her death.

“Got something else here,” Krycek said, drawing Mulder’s attention back to the images. “Look, down in the corner there. See that? Keep your eye on it.” Krycek flicked through a few images, and Mulder could see a black shadow move across bottom right of the screen.

“Send me those, too,” he said.

The elevator binged, the doors opened, and suddenly they were back in the lobby of the hospital, surrounded by the bustle of the early morning shift-change. They blinked at the light after their adventures in the darkness of the floors below.

Scully grabbed Mulder by the elbow and pulled him away from Krycek. With her other hand, she pointed at the large desk that dominated the lobby, behind which a number of nurses and receptionists worked industriously. “You two wait there. And Spender, you don’t let that man out of your sight. He’s a dangerous criminal.”

She dragged Mulder down the corridor a little, and pulled him into an empty office, away from them. Krycek watched her go, his face amiable.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, turning back to Spender when the office door closed, “guess I’m out of here.”

“You’re leaving?” Spender demanded. “You heard what she said.”

“Yes, I did. And I’m not waiting around here to be arrested.” He waved a nurse over and asked to pay his bill. He didn’t even blink at the exorbitant amount of money he was being charged, simply took out a platinum credit card and said he’d pay the amount in full, there and then.

“If she comes back and you’re gone,” Spender tried again.

“You afraid of Dana Scully?” Krycek asked, amused.

“No, of course not, but” –

“Well, you should be! She frightens the life out of me.”

“You know she’ll just send agents to your house.”

“Good job she doesn’t know where I live.”

“She does. Well, we do, Mulder and I, and you know he’ll tell her.”

“Thanks for the warning.” Krcyek shot Spender a sunny smile. “I’ll be gone before the cops show up.”

“Alex, please” –

“No, Jeff, don’t do it. Don’t even think about asking me to stay around here. I told you before: I’m out and I’m staying out, and that means staying out of jail, too.” He patted Spender on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself. Stay out of trouble, and stay off the old man’s radar.”

“Oh, you didn’t hear? The old man is dead. Mulder killed him early tonight. Last night, I should say.”

Krycek’s smile became even sunnier. “He did? Well, good for him! Things are looking up, huh? Hopefully this time the old bastard will stay dead.”

And with that, he was gone, swaggering out of the sliding doors and down the steps. Spender didn’t bother watching him leave: he just sighed, dragged his hand over his face, and waited for the wrath of Scully.

**xxx**

Mulder listened carefully to Scully. As she spoke, connections were being made in his brain.

“Just remarkable, we can’t explain it. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She had her hand on her forehead, as she tried to puzzle through what she had seen with her own eyes. “He was being prepped and he just… woke up. His spine seems to have… spontaneously healed itself. And it was definitely broken, Mulder: I saw the x-rays myself. It took about… maybe a half an hour in total, but he’s fine. He’s absolutely fine. He’s up and walking around, talking, no sign of any cuts or bruises… Even the marks from where he was attached to drips, the blood packs, all gone. He’s completely healed.”

“Nanotechnology,” Mulder said. “That’s why he was here: he came to save Skinner’s life.”

“Is this something to do with Krycek?” she asked.

He nodded. “I think so. We saw him leaving the building earlier. We followed him, but I never found out why he was here. Think about it, Scully: Skinner looks like he’s going to die – certainly he’ll never walk again, if he survives – and suddenly Krycek is here and Skinner’s up and about like Christ resurrected. We know he has – at least _had –_ access to that technology. We know he can use that technology to kill, and he can use it to reverse the damage it does. It makes sense that he knows how to use it to heal other injuries.”

“So, what? He came out of hiding tonight, to a place where he knew at least two FBI agents would be on high alert, very possibly even more, considering Skinner’s position within the Bureau, to save his life?” Scully looked incredulous. “Why would he do that? Has he been blackmailing Skinner again? Using him to gain access to information?”

“I don’t think so,” Mulder replied. “I mean, it’s Krycek, so maybe, but we haven’t seen any trace of him since we re-opened X Files. Skinner hasn’t mentioned him at all. Maybe he just…”

“What, Mulder?”

“Maybe he wanted to help.” Even as he said it, he knew that she would never accept that explanation. As predicted, she scoffed audibly.

“This is Alex Krycek we’re talking about here,” she said pointedly. “Alex Krycek doesn’t help unless it benefits him personally.”

Mulder shrugged. “Maybe he’s changed.”

“Or maybe you had so much fun on your little ghost adventure,” she snapped. “Maybe you just remembered what it was like, working with someone who hung on your every word and believed even your most outlandish theories.”

Mulder shrugged again, and knew that there was a small part of what she said that rung true. Thinking back to his first case with Krycek, it had been… validating, almost, when he had said _“I think that Cole possesses the psychic ability to manipulate sounds and images, to generate illusions that are so convincing they can kill,”_ and the response had been a slight pause followed by a glib remark and _“at least it begins to explain some things.”_

Granted, the easy acceptance probably came from the fact that Krycek’s own, secret, employers were the ones behind such experiments as those carried out on Augustus Cole and the rest of his unit, but still, it had been nice not to have been greeted with rolled eyes and skepticism for once.

“There’s something else,” Scully said, cutting through his reverie. Now she was pausing, gaging him carefully, trying to guess and manage his reaction. He knew the signs: he probably wouldn’t be happy with what she had to say.

“I ran some tests, earlier. On Krycek’s blood. I wanted to check it against any open cases in the database.”

Mulder nodded. Here it was: Krycek had lied about everything, hadn’t he? He’d been out there, as he predicted the old man had been, destroying lives and working for his own ends. “And?”

“Just the usual,” she admitted. “Nothing since 2001. Except for… Well, except for a very old, very cold case, from 1979.”

“What case?” Mulder asked with a frown.

“His DNA matched with a murder victim: a Russian immigrant named – “ she checked her phone quickly – “Galina Krycek, neé Arntzen. She and her husband, also Russian, were murdered in their home in Aurora, New York, and her ten-year-old son, Alexander, went missing. He was never found.”

“I’m guessing we just found him.”

She cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. “I guess so.”

“Her son,” Mulder said. “You called him ‘her son’. I assume her husband was the step-father?”

“According to the bloodwork, apparently so. But,” she added with a frown, “nothing in the case suggests that he wasn’t the boy’s father. He’s never referred to as anything other than the biological parent. Then again, the mother has a number of arrests for solicitation and prostitution.”

“Hmm.” Mulder adopted a thoughtful pose. “Maybe she never knew who the father was. Or maybe she thought it was her husband’s child. Were there any other hits?”

“Yes.” She paused again, and looked as though she was gearing herself up for something. “Here’s where it gets weirder. He shares DNA with… with you and Jeffery Spender. And probably William. You all share the same father.”

Mulder felt his mouth drop open. _“No!”_ he gasped. “Shut the front door! What the hell?”

“I ran it twice.” She handed him the DNA paperwork, along with his own and Spender’s. “Why would he keep that from you, Mulder? Surely he would have thought that the knowledge would… give him some sort of leverage with you?”

“I don’t think he knows,” Mulder said. His eyes were still flitting over the paperwork, comparing and contrasting. “He once told me his parents were both Russian immigrants. Hell, I don’t think the old man even knew: he called Jeffery his second-born earlier tonight, right before he shot… shot William.”

“Mulder, that old bastard knew everything,” Scully said softly. “How could he not know this?”

Mulder shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just a hunch. Not that it matters now that the old bastard is finally dead.”

“Are you going to tell Krycek?”

Mulder shrugged. “What’s the point? I don’t think it matters any more, and I really don’t think he’d thank me for it. If his parents were murdered, what’s the point in tainting his memories of his mother?”

“And if the old man isn’t dead? He survived a goddamn missile to the face and still didn’t die!”

“If Alex has managed to stay off his radar for this long, I doubt he’ll do anything now to bring attention to himself.”

**Epilogue**

The next morning saw Mulder and Spender drive back to the house they had seen Krycek entering. True to his word, however, he was already gone. Instead, a crew of men were striping the house of boxes and furniture. Mulder tapped the steering wheel of the car thoughtfully; the DNA evidence Scully had discovered last night now in an envelope tucked into his jacket’s inside pocket. He told Spender to stay with the car before going into the house, already knowing that Krycek was gone, but still feeling like he had to try. He wasn’t sure, though, what he was going to do. He still didn’t think it was completely right, telling Alex what they had found out, but in one way Scully was right: if the old man wasn’t completely dead yet then surely Alex had the right to know, in order to protect himself should the old bastard turn to him, and try to drag him into his new Conspiracy the way he’d tried with William and Mulder himself.

Outside, Spender got out of the car and wandered down to where the movers were working industriously to pack the back of a small van. He also had a hunch that Krycek was gone: he’d read the truth in the man’s eyes early that morning, when he’d vowed to leave as soon as possible.

“Great day for a drive,” he said pleasantly to one of the men, who was leaning against the side of the truck finishing off a cigarette. “I always loved driving, you know? I work in an office, but when I was younger I always wanted to work driving.”

“The open road,” the man agreed, just as pleasantly. “I get it. Don’t get me wrong, some of the long hauls are a pain in my ass, literally, but I get it.”

“You got a long one ahead of you today?”

“Naw, not really. Less than two hours, if we don’t hit traffic. Over on the shore of Lake Anna. You know it?”

“Sure do. It’s a beautiful drive from here.”

“Sure is.”

“Well, enjoy your day, and have a safe trip.” Spender smiled brightly and wandered back to the car. By the time Mulder had come out of the building he had already pulled up listings for houses to rent and buy on the shore of Lake Anna. There was just one: a rental property that was now listed as off the market as of this morning, but hadn’t been taken down from the site yet.

“He’s gone,” Mulder said as he got back into the car. He slapped the steering wheel lightly in frustration. He still wasn’t sure what to think about Krycek, but he had a gut feeling that letting the man slip back into the shadows, with no idea of where he was or what he was doing, was a bad idea.

“I think I know where he is,” Spender said. He texted Mulder the listing, complete with the address.

“How’d you find that out?” Mulder asked, unable to keep the surprised admiration out of his voice.

“You weren’t not the only FBI agent in the family, Fox, and they sure didn’t hire me for my charm and good looks.”

“Thanks, Jeffery. You wanna take a trip out there? Check he’s where he should be?”

“Me? No.” Spender shook his head. “If Alex Krycek wanted to see me, he’d have given me his address himself. He says he’s out of it, and I have no reason not to believe him. Give him his peace, Mulder.”

Mulder nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said, and the answer came to his lips so quickly he wondered if he already knew it was a lie.


	2. In a Medium Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A conversation about life and death on a lake shore between two former enemies. Skinner finally admits he was dosed with MK Naomi, and Alex decides to help.

**In a Medium Place**

**Prologue**

A week like any other. But it shouldn’t have been.

Up early every morning, into the office, meetings and meetings and reading reports, chewing out the agents under him when they deserved it; dropping scant praise when it was needed. Home in the evenings to his spartan apartment, hating the silence but resenting the need for the television to create background noise and ambiance. The gym, a few hours sparring in the boxing ring, a few meals he cooked himself, some delivered to his door, a glass or two of whiskey. Probably too many. He was putting away a bottle over the course of two nights now. Better than his peers, many of whom were a shot or three away from fully-fledged alcohol abuse, but in their line of work it happened. They’re time of life, too.

Moving through his own life like a ghost. Work, gym, home, food, drink, sleep. Taking steps in between to care for himself on a basic level. Showers, brushing his teeth (carefully: he’d lost another two, and now needed to get fitted for a bridge), trimming his neat beard, taking care of himself as mechanically as possible. Aware that these things needed to be done, but taking no pleasure in fulfilling the actions.

A week like any other. But it shouldn’t have been.

He should be dead. He knew that. He remembered the night, the events leading up to the moment the car hit him, ran him over, left him pinned to the ground. Remembered seeing Monica’s face. She looked shocked at what was happening, shouting something. Now he believed she was trying to stop it from happening. But at the time it was so fast, so dark, the light hitting the windscreen in such a way that things were blurred and hidden from him. He’d raised his gun. He’d started to shoot. The glass had cracked at first, absorbing the first bullet, but by the third she was dead. His aim had been good: he’d got her in the forehead and taken her life quickly and cleanly.

But he shouldn’t have shot at her, he now thought. Now, he believed that he should have been shooting at her passenger. The old bastard, stained in blood and nicotine, who had simply grabbed the wheel from her dead hands and aimed the car at Skinner. The one who’d run Skinner down, pinned him to the cold, hard concrete, taken his gun and walked away. Walked away to the docks, where he’d gunned down a kid, believing him to be Mulder. Through his actions, throughout all of the boy’s life, that man had worked to take him from his parents and the ones who could have loved and protected him.

The old man had talked about artificial insemination, but it was no more than rape. He had violated Scully, impregnated her against her knowledge, kept hunting from the shadows until she was forced to give up her child. He’d ordered the boy’s adoptive parents murdered. He’d driven the boy underground, into hiding. He’d kept hunting, forcing the boy to make desperate choices and stupid chances in the hope of exposing him. And when he finally had the boy cornered, he’d murdered him. He’d put a bullet in his head and dropped him into the freezing waters of the bay. He’d torn the boy from his family, and eventually from his life, and denied Scully the chance to be a mother.

Well, to be a mother to William, at least.

Skinner’s first week back at the Bureau had deviated from the norm. She’d come to him, announced her pregnancy, and then resigned. He hadn’t blamed her, and hadn’t tried too hard to get her to change her mind. Away from the Bureau, and away from the X Files, she had a chance to finally be the mother she’d always wanted to be, and he didn’t want to do anything that would force her to give up this second chance.

Mulder would stay. They seemed to be together, and she seemed to have no problem with his desire to continue on in the FBI. He would work, she would enjoy her pregnancy, secretly revelling in every part of it, from the aching back and feet to the morning sickness and strange cravings. Eventually, she would give birth, and no doubt Mulder would be there, and together they would be able to live… not a normal life, no, never that, but something that approached normality. He would continue floating his weird theories, and would be ever watchful for signs that the conspiracy was somehow continuing, despite the old man’s death. Watchful for the Spartan virus that Scully had warned about, but without the old man and the boy it was doubtful that it would come to pass now.

And so things had faded back to normal. Well, as normal as they ever had been. And now Skinner went through his days like a passenger to his own life, never fully understanding how the hell he wasn’t dead. How he wasn’t injured. How he’d managed to sit up on the operating table and ask questions as he pulled wires from his body, confused at what was going on. After, when they’d given him a full physical before finally declaring him completely healthy and well, just as confused as he was, he’d tried to ask Mulder and Scully what the hell had happened, but they seemed to be just as much in the dark as he was.

He thought, for a second, there was something in Mulder’s eyes, but it had passed quickly from sight and was replaced by a puzzled look. They both confessed that they had no idea how he’d healed: how he’d gone from death’s door to walking around, annoyed because the doctors had had to cut his pants off him and all he had was a pair of hospital jimmies. Annoyed because his car was back on the coast and he had to call a car to come pick him up. Annoyed because he’d have to use a Bureau issued car for the next while, until his own was released to him. Annoyed because suddenly he was home, and he was alone, and there was nothing but the silence of his life to greet him.

He hadn’t even been tired enough to sleep the day through, so he’d answered his emails, assured his bosses that he wouldn’t be taking any time off, and then drank his way through half a bottle of whiskey. When he’d judged that he was drunk enough he went to bed.

He got up the next morning and went to work. The gym. Home. Food. The other half of the bottle of whiskey. Bed. He’d had a shower at some stage, brushed his teeth, made sure his beard was neat.

Because it was all wrong. He shouldn’t be here: he should be dead.

Finally, about four weeks after the incident, someone had relented. He’d gone into his office early on Friday morning to find a piece of paper left on his desk. On the paper was an address. There was nothing else, no name or any indication who had left it or where it led. But he thought it might have come from Mulder. He’d ranted at the man a little the day before, on the Thursday. It had begun with an expense report and a few notes Agent Einstein had added to Mulder’s last report, but ended in a short rant about how everything was wrong, and that the life Skinner had been given back was empty and futile. He hadn’t meant to say anything, let alone that.

And so, on Friday morning, here was an address. No name. No hint to where it led. Just an inkling that it had to be followed in order to find closure, and perhaps even some purpose again.

**Act One**

It was late. Too late to be driving out to the address, but Skinner didn’t care. He’d gotten out of work late, gone to the gym, and was driving home when the desire seized him. The thought of returning to the apartment, and to the silence that lay waiting behind the door, the life that didn’t feel like his own, simply turned him cold. Instead, he’d stopped at a late-night off licence and bought two bottles of whiskey – he didn’t have to go out now for the rest of the weekend, if the address turned out to be nothing – before getting back on the road and driving the two hours out to the shore of Lake Anna.

There was nothing there, not that he could see. A house lay in darkness beyond, but when he approached it there didn’t seem to be any sign of life. It was 11 pm. Perhaps the person, or people, who lived inside had a more active social life than Skinner, and were gone out for the evening. Or perhaps they had gone to bed early. But he had walked around the house, on the wrap-around porch that encircled the building, and had seen nothing inside. Curtains had been drawn on some windows, lending credence to the belief that whoever lived there had gone to bed.

He’d tried knocking, but there had been no answer.

No car stood in the gravelled driveway. No sounds except the heavy sound of the water hitting the shore.

He went back to the car and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. He opened it and drank straight from the bottle, necking it in long, loud gulps. With nothing else to do, he went to the shore of the lake and watched the moon and the stars sparkle on the softly slopping water. It wasn’t choppy though. One could still have put a boat out and fished, if one was of the persuasion and inclination to do so. He sat down on the rocky beach, not caring that it was less than comfortable, and continued drinking. He wasn’t thinking of much.

He was thinking of less when he drained the bottle about an hour later, and began filling his pockets with stones. He felt oddly calm. He felt that he had, at last, found a way to get closure. He didn’t take off his shoes, just started wading out into the lake. The chill of the water did nothing to him. It certainly didn’t shock him back to any clear-headed realisation. He kept going, until the water hit his waist. He stood for a moment, and admired the moon above him: how clear and big it was here, away from the lights of the city. Then, he pushed forward, happy that his feet at last began to slip. Suddenly he was submerged, but still he tried to go forward, to get away from the shallows and the waves that could push him back to safety. He was still calm, even when he realised that he couldn’t get his head above water. He was starting to sink further, weighted down by his clothes and the rocks. He struck out, swimming a little, trying to get into the deeper water.

Calm. That was what he felt. He hadn’t known he was going to do this, but now that he had he didn’t care that it was the end. He hoped his life wouldn’t flash before his eyes though: he couldn’t bear to see it all again. His chest began to burst, an ache as his held breath began to riot and complain: his lungs wanted to open and draw in air.

He let them, and started to drown.

His body thrashed against it, but he still didn’t care. He let it. It was natural for it to fight, but this wasn’t so bad. Soon things went dark, and he cared even less.

He didn’t feel the hand that grasped him. He didn’t feel himself being hauled up to the surface. He didn’t even feel the cold air that slapped his face and head when he broke the water and was dragged back to the shore. He didn’t feel himself being laid on the rocky beach, and he didn’t feel someone starting CPR. He didn’t feel his body’s survival mode kicking in. But he felt the water being expelled from his lungs. He felt that, when it came up and out of his mouth and nose. He felt the coughing fit that wracked his body.

And then he simply lay there and stared at the stars for a while. Eventually, he turned his head, and found a ghost staring at him. Mist had started to rise from the surface of the lake and crawled over them, and that was fitting. It was fitting that the otherworld, the place beyond life, had a somnambulant, eerie feeling, and that sounds beyond them – beyond the beach, his breathing, and that of the ghost – were muffled.

It was exactly right.

“Where am I?” he asked at last. He was still looking at the ghost. It suddenly seemed fitting that it was this particular ghost that should welcome him into the afterlife.

“Where do you think you are?” Krycek asked.

Skinner thought about the question. “Purgatory,” he said at last. “Limbo.”

“I heard they did away with that,” Krycek answered.

Skinner nodded. “And yet here I am.”

Krycek raised an eyebrow, and Skinner found himself looking away, looking back to the sky. Strange that the moon was just as big, although obscured now by the mist, which was thickening into a proper fog. “This place,” he said aloud, “is a reflection of the world, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Yes. And I’m glad it’s you that’s here.”

“Are you?” The ghost of Alex Krycek sounded bemused. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to see me at all, under any circumstances.”

“Ah, but these are not just any circumstances, are they?”

“No,” Krycek said wryly, “I don’t suppose they are. Why’d you do it, Walter? Why’d you jump in the lake?”

“You mean, why did I kill myself?”

“Well, you didn’t” –

“Because I wanted to. Because this is all I had left. I don’t regret it, either.”

Krycek frowned. “Uh, ok. But why?”

“I was dying.”

“Oh. Oh crap.” Krycek looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Skinner turned his head again to look at the ghost of Alex Krycek. He really did look sorry to hear that. There was concern in his eyes.

“Is it cancer?” Krycek asked. “It’s ok if you don’t want to talk about it. I understand. I wouldn’t want to talk to me about it either, if I were you.”

“No, it’s not cancer,” Skinner replied, his voice quiet. “It’s something else. Something I don’t fully understand. But I think it’s going to steal my sanity before it kills me. It may even make me do terrible things to the people around me. To the people I love.”

“Wait,” Krycek said with a frown, “like, uh, dementia or something? Alzheimer’s?”

“No. Something else. I don’t know if there’s a name for it.”

“What is it, like, Walter Skinner’s Disease? Like Lou Gehrig’s? You’re the only person in the world who has it?”

“No, there’s more of us. But it came from our own government, and you know as well as I do that they’ll never admit that they gave it to us, and they’ll never help us, let alone tell us what it is.”

“What?” Krycek looked confused now. “What are you talking about? What happened to you?”

“I was dosed with something called MK Naomi.”

“Wait, the thing they were working on after MK Ultra?” Krycek’s confusion had deepened. “I thought they gave that up after the ‘70s?”

“Apparently not,” Skinner replied. “They’ve been dosing the residents of a town called Mud Lick, in Kentucky, with it too.”

“Hey, I know Mud Lick.” A smile flitted across Krycek’s face. “The wrestler, uh, Hillbilly Jim came from Mud Lick.”

“It’s also the site of a veteran’s hospital, used to treat ex-army that fought in Vietnam. They’ve been dosing the vets with Naomi too.”

“That how you got dosed? They send you to a vet’s hospital for some reason?”

“No. I got dosed back in ‘Nam. We were sent with a case of Naomi, to bring it to a secure rendezvous point, but they put us down in an active fire fight.” Skinner went back to staring at the moon. He could barely see it now, the fog was that thick. He wondered, if he sat up and concentrated hard enough, if he would see other souls making their way across the lake to the afterlife. Would they find a ghost from their past too? Would they also sit and speak like old friends?

Krycek stayed silent. Skinner was grateful. He’d thought a lot about this over the last while, since his encounter with Davey James had brought all the details back to the front of his mind. He’d never voiced his theories out loud though. He simply didn’t have anyone to talk them through with. If he’d gone to Scully her doctor side would have kicked in, and if he’d gone to Mulder he’d have treated it like an X File. Skinner didn’t want either of those things to happen: he just wanted to say it aloud, and see if it still made sense. Perhaps now he had a ghost to speak to, he would be able to puzzle through it at his own speed.

**Act Two**

“They put us down in the middle of a fire fight. One of us got hit right away, but Kitten and I made it to a hut. We were able to drop the crate there, but I had to go back for my friend. Leave no man behind, you know? I told Kitten to stay with the crate. He wasn’t alone. There were a number of civilians – old men, children, women – also in the hut, sheltering from the gunfire outside. But when I got back I saw that the crate had been hit. Green gas was pouring out of it, engulfing the hut, obscuring everything. I couldn’t see. I could only hear… the sound. Of Kitten. As he murdered every civilian in that hut.

“And for a second, Alex, for a split second, I swear to God I saw a monster come towards me. It had Kitten’s voice, but it was not him. It was a terrifying creature that crawled out of the green fog, promising death. And then it was him. It was Kitten, but, oh God, Alex, he had changed. My friend was gone. A demon had walked into his body and taken him over. Before, he was a quiet man, practically still a boy, drafted into a war he didn’t want to fight. He never balked, though. He was scared, we all were, but Kitten faced up to his fear and he walked beside us into hell, just about crapping his pants every step of the way. But he never turned and ran.

“He was gentle. He loved cats. He was as soft as a cat, that’s why we called him Kitten. He wasn’t no panther, Alex, no jungle cat, not like you. No feral hunter. He was a soft little house cat. But after that… he just changed. His whole personality just… changed. He now charged into battle, took risks with his own life. He treated the war like it was a sport, and he wanted to win. He would hack ears from dead people – women, children, it didn’t matter just as long as they fell under his gun – and wear them around his neck like a grotesque trophy. He was the reason I… killed a boy. A little boy, no more than ten years old. Kitten had cut his ear off, not realising he wasn’t dead yet. Later, the boy came walking into our camp, up behind the others, covered with grenades. He wanted vengeance for what Kitten had done to him. For what we’d done to his whole village.

“I had to point my gun at that boy. But he didn’t stop walking. So then I had to kill him, to save my friends. But Alex, I don’t think we deserved to be saved. Not after what we had done. And not after what I stood by and watched Kitten do. Every depraved act he committed, I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t speak up, never told him it was wrong. Never joined in, but never put a stop to it either. And for that I was just as culpable.

“Now I know it wasn’t him, it was the gas we were dosed with. They put us in that fire fight hoping it would happen, that the flimsy crate would leak and dose us with that poison. Kitten took a face full of it, I just happened in afterwards. It didn’t hit me the way it hit him. It didn’t change me the way it changed him. He didn’t stand a chance. We were their Guinea pigs, and that’s all we were to them. Expendable bodies that were owned by the US army. By the government.

“When we got back… They had no use for us. Well, not for Kitten, anyway. He had been too exposed to Naomi. He couldn’t function in society any more, not the way he was. They court martialled him, and sent him to the facility out by Mud Lick. I guess they kept experimenting on him, and held him for decades after as they tried to perfect that poison. When they finally let him go he was too used up and too old to be much of a threat any more. So he killed himself. And that was my fault.

“I was asked to speak at his court martial, and I told my superior that the gas had changed him from the sweet boy he was to the cruel man he became, and they told me not to. They told me to shut up and leave that part out, and just tell the court about all the foul acts Kitten had committed. If I didn’t, they’d court martial me too, they’d ruin me and destroy my life, and I guess I would have ended up in the same facility as Kitten, just as broken as he was.

“But I should have done it, Alex. I should have spoken up. I should have helped him. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong, and I knew that my government, and my army, had no right to do that to Kitten. No right to do that to any soldier. They may have owned our asses, but we weren’t their slaves. We weren’t their subjects. God damn it, Alex, we were just soldiers. And now I’ve been dosed again by that poison, and I’m waiting, every day I’m waiting, to descend into the madness that stole Kitten from this world. I’m waiting for the blackness to take over my heart, for the time when I become the cruel one, the one capable of evil.

“Although now I’m here, and I’m facing you, I wonder if I wasn’t the evil one all along.”

He could hear the shocked laughter in Alex’s voice when he said; “Jesus, Walter, you’re not evil! You’re one of the least evil people I know. And coming from me, that’s a compliment.”

“I still did those things. I still left my friend behind, when I swore no man would be.”

“You were _kid,_ Walter. We all do stupid stuff we regret when we’re kids. Believe me on that,” he added ruefully.

“I destroyed that man’s life. All I had to do was speak up.”

“And?” Alex demanded. “What? Lose your own freedom? Any chance at a career? A normal life? Nobody wants that for their friends. Help, yes, but not to see the ones we love throw their own lives away. And you know what, from what you said, that guy Kitten had a couple of screws loose.”

Skinner turned to him again, this time it was his turn to be shocked by the bluntness of the words.

“I’m sorry.” Alex held his hands up, a gesture of supplication. “But if he was that far gone by the time you guys got back here, how the hell would he have survived in the real world? You’d have spoken up, and maybe got him released, but when he done a Whitman and climbed those steps, and killed a bunch of people, you would have had a whole new set of regrets, my friend. And those wouldn’t have been about enemy non-combatants in a foreign war. They would have been a whole new set of American corpses sitting on your soul.”

Skinner opened his mouth to reply, but found he had no words to argue with that logic.

“This guy, Kitten. He have a wife? Children?”

“One wife. One son. Davey.”

“They would have been the first to die, you know it? He’d have started at his own house, killing his family before taking the show on the road. You know the type, Walter, I know you do.”

“I know it. But you can’t know for sure he would have done that.”

“Yes, Walter, I can. And so do you. PTSD, on top of a dose of poison that makes you crazy and turns you into a killing machine, can be a hell of a thing.”

“But look at everything else I’ve done.”

“The hell you talking about?” Krycek asked, mystified. “What else you done? Serve the people of America for… how many years? I know you got your twenty done already, but you keep going. You were already there about, what? Ten years? Before I got there, and that was ’94. Thirty-some years protecting the people of America, even in the face of an incompetent goon sitting in the White House trying to discredit the whole damn Bureau. Whole swathes of white bread America suddenly thinking you guys are the CIA, running kiddy-fiddling rings out of the basement of a pizzeria. Harvesting their fear-sweat to get celebrities high.”

“Wait, _that’s_ what they think Pizza-Gate is?” Skinner asked.

“QAnon, man, it is _wild_. It’s the thinking man’s conspiracy for people who just don’t think. And you thought what I was peddling was the worst thing we could come up with.” Alex shot him a wry grin. “Walter, listen to me: you’re not to blame for what happened to your friend. You followed orders.”

“So did the guards at Auschwitz,” Skinner said darkly.

“Well that’s a false equivalency if ever I heard one.” Krycek shook his head, clearly amused now.

“No it isn’t,” Skinner insisted. “It wasn’t an excuse then, and it still isn’t.”

“No, you’re right, it’s not an excuse. But it’s not the same situation. You can’t compare the two. Auschwitz ended with the deaths of over a million people. And I’m not saying,” he added, holding his hands up again, “that what your friend did wasn’t a bunch of war crimes either. Clearly it was. But one crazy person going to a facility is not the same as marching 1.3 million people through the gates of a death camp.”

“But they kept experimenting on him when he was in there.”

“And that’s awful. It really is. I feel bad for him. But I don’t see how that’s your fault either. Did you sign the orders? Did you conduct those experiments? Did you even know about it? You came back from a broken war, straight into a broken country, and one person cannot stand against the government and the military combined. You’re a lot of things, Walter Skinner, but you’re not strong enough to take the brunt of both together. Especially not when you were just a kid at the time. You can’t keep beating yourself up over that. It was a costly mistake, but honestly I’d say you’ve paid the price by now. You must have done. You’ve been trying to make up for it every day since then, haven’t you?”

“Ineffectually.”

Krycek shrugged. “Like I said, one person can’t take it all on. Not even Mulder can and he tried for years.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Skinner said. He turned away to face the sky. The moon was gone now. Only the fog remained. “I’m dead now, anyway.”

“Tell me about that,” Krycek said. “How’d they dose you again with that crap? I assume you’d have gone around the twist already, if they’d managed to get the dose right in ‘Nam.”

“Maybe they got the dose right. Maybe all the bad things I’ve done since then, I’ve done under the influence of Naomi.”

“Well, you haven’t gone on any killing sprees, so I’d debate that point with you.”

“I killed you, didn’t I?”

“Aw, shucks, I’ll get over it.”

“I should have known, shouldn’t I?”

Krycek shrugged. “Known what?”

Walter looked over at him. “I should have known what was going on. What you’d gotten caught up with.”

“How could you know?”

“The signs were there. Suddenly being assigned to my division. Getting the cases you wanted, the ones that seemed tailer made for Mulder. Getting assigned as his partner. There were probably more. You were young. If I’d paid any attention, if I’d listened to my gut, if I’d just reached out to you, I could have helped you.”

Krycek shook his head. His eyes narrowed, and suddenly he looked dangerous, the way he used to, back when he was alive. “You couldn’t have helped me, Walter.”

“I could have. I could have provided a way out. I could have got him off your back. I could have tried.”

“No. I was already too far gone by then. Believe me.”

“But you were my agent, Alex. You were my subordinate. I owed it to you to try.”

“You owed me nothing, Walter. There is nothing you could have done to help me. There was no help you could have offered, that I would have taken.” Alex held his right hand up and made the sign of the cross. “I hereby absolve you of all sins, relating to me. You are washed clean.”

Skinner sighed. “How long had you been working for them?”

“Too long.”

“You were only, what? 25? Couldn’t have been that long.”

Krycek smiled a brittle smile. “I was ten years old when the old man got his claws into me.”

“Ten?” Walter knew his face showed the shock his voice betrayed. “How the hell…?”

“We’re not here to discuss that,” Alex said, and Walter could see by how Alex’s face had gone blank, his eyes and expression shutting down, that there would be no discussion of _his_ life before death.

So Walter lay back, and wondered how there could exist any god cruel enough to explain how the old smoking bastard had lasted as long as he did.

“Tell me about Naomi,” Alex said, his voice soft. Any hint of the bitterness from the moment before was gone. Now the voice was as smooth as satin. “How did they get you again?”

“I don’t know. I went out to Mud Lick, to try and find Kitten. All I found was a mess. Other vets being killed by Kitten’s son, Davey.”

“He got dosed too?”

“Probably. Must have been.”

“Couldn’t have been that psychosis runs in the family?” Alex offered. “Father passes his poor mental health to the son?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There were… other symptoms.”

“Like what? You lose your hair?”

Skinner barked a laugh at that. “No, smart ass. Although… My teeth.”

“Your teeth?” Alex quirked an eyebrow at him. “I don’t want to be the barer of bad news, but I think that’s a consequence of getting older, too.”

Walter shook his head. “Not like this. The whole town was losing their teeth. It’s a side effect of Naomi. It started happening to Kitten out in ‘Nam. Didn’t start happening to me until Mud Lick.”

“So the whole town’s being dosed?” Alex asked.

“Seems like it.”

“How, Walther? Talk logistics to me.”

Skinner thought about it for a second, thought about what Davey had said to Mulder and Scully, when Skinner himself was lying in a pit, speared through the belly by a log that had been sharpened into a lethal stake.

“Chem trails?” he said at last.

Now it was Krycek’s turn to laugh. “Chem trails?” he said, his voice dripping with amusement. “And there we have it, oh my friends and neighbours, QAnon’s even less intelligent cousin. Slightly above the flat earth movement, but separated from it by only by a matter of brain cells! Chem trails!” He gave a snort. “My ass it’s chem trails. I said talk logistics to me, Walter. Get me all hot and bothered. How are they dosing one small township, and not the rest of America?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something in the water maybe? Pesticides? Something extra added to the locally produced foodstuffs?”

“I don’t know, Alex,” Walter said, his voice barely more than a sigh.

“Well, luckily for your dumb ass I didn’t go into the lake with all my clothes on.” Alex reached down behind the boulder he was sitting on, and grabbed his leather jacket. He fished his phone out of the pockets and began to Google the town of Mud Lick. “Some of us managed to save our electronics.”

“They got those here?” Skinner asked, genuinely surprised.

“Yeah, of course,” Alex replied. He gestured around. “I mean, it’s hardly the Boonies. We get great reception here.”

“I’d hoped that the afterlife didn’t involve modern technology. I’d hoped that it’s a spiritual journey that finally leads to self-fulfilment.”

“Naw, I think that’s just life you’re describing,” Alex said slowly. “What do you think is going on?”

“This is the border place. The place between the living and the dead. Here, I face the ghosts of my life, before moving on to the other place: the Good Place. Or perhaps hell, if that’s my fate.” Skinner said this in such a calm way that Alex began to get worried.

“Ok.” Alex slipped his jacket on, and put his phone away. “I think you drank a little too much, buddy. Against my better judgement, I’m going to bring you back to my place and let you sleep it off.”

“Is it like a medium place?”

“I don’t know: I never watched that show.”

“It was very funny.”

“Yeah, I’ll catch it on Netflix when I got the time. Up you come, Walter. That’s it, hang onto my neck. _Jeez_ you’re a big man.”

“I’m in shape.”

“Yes you are. Oof. I feel that muscle dragging me down. Alright, you steady? Let’s go. One foot in front of the other, and you’ll feel better in a few hours.”

“You know what, Krycek? I always liked you.”

Alex laughed at that. “No you didn’t,” he said pleasantly. “You hated me!”

“Yeah, I hated you, but I _like-_ liked you. You always had really pretty eyes.” Walter shook his head at Krycek’s answering snort of laughter. “No, I’m serious. Accept the compliment. Own it.”

“Consider it accepted. It is officially owned. Now let’s get you to bed.”

**Act Three**

Walter Skinner opened his eyes and considered the whiteness above him.

It was not heaven. It was not even hell. It was just a ceiling. A ceiling in whatever place Alex Krycek had been sent when he had died. When he had been murdered by Walter Skinner.

Skinner tried to recall the satisfaction of that moment. Three bullets. Three times a ball of gratification coiled in his stomach, so deep he could feel it in his balls. Two shots to cause pain. He had tried to reason that those shots had been the warning shots, to let Krycek know he wasn’t in the mood to screw around, and if the man persisted he would take the kill shot. But all Krycek had left at his disposal was a prosthetic arm and a hand that couldn’t hold a gun, let alone pull the trigger, and Skinner knew those shots had been for him. For Mulder. For Scully. For the baby she carried. For countless others who had drawn the attention of a man with a seemingly limitless capacity for malice and cruelty. Those shots had been malicious and cruel in return, designed only to try to cause the same pain Krycek had inflicted on others.

Time had dimmed the feeling, though. Almost twenty years had passed, and Skinner knew now that he no longer hated Alex Krycek. What was the point in hating a dead man? What was the point in nursing a grudge that could never be lifted through vengeance or foul words? No, somewhere along the way, across a thousand sleepless nights that saw Skinner lying awake as he considered his life and his actions, he realised he no longer hated Krycek. Perhaps it had only been the passage of time that had blunted those feelings, as they had blunted the feeling of nasty satisfaction he had got when he pulled the trigger that final time. Or perhaps, in desperate need to castigate himself more, he had assigned less blame to Krycek. Led astray, in need of help, no one to turn to: an agent that couldn’t trust his own section head to help.

The truth probably lay in between. The living Alex Krycek had probably not been a completely evil person. That could be inferred from the fact that the dead Alex Krycek was inhabiting this misty in-between world, rather than languishing in hell. He was, in all probability, just a man acting in response to the unbelievable things that were happening to him, and around him. Acting in his own self-interest, yes, out of greed and the desire to survive at the top of the hierarchy, but in that he was no different from billions of other people, had they been in the same position.

And in turn, Skinner was not to blame for the path Krycek had taken. Maybe he had been too caught up in protecting Mulder to see that Krycek had strayed from the light, but by the man’s own admission it had been too late to pull him back from that road. By his own admission, there was no help that Skinner could have given, no reasoning he could have used, that would have caused Krycek to turn to the side of right.

Perhaps this was Krycek’s personal hell. Perhaps he was consigned to this place until all those he had hurt, and destroyed, and hunted, had passed. Perhaps it was his job to meet them at the gates of dawn, and talk to them, and help them on their journey while he languished here, instead of in some fiery pit, denied his own final release into the Light. Perhaps this was his atonement.

The bed was very warm, and very comfortable. Finally, Skinner sat up and looked around.

The room was not what he was expecting. He assumed it was the nature of Alex Krycek to travel light: to own only what he could carry. He expected clean lines and empty space. Instead, it was cluttered: clothes had been piled next to an empty laundry hamper, for some reason. Books were stacked on the floor at the end of the bed, almost blocking passage to the other side of the room. One would have to be careful to traverse that narrow path without knocking something over. The only other way to get to the window, to open the curtains, was to walk on top of the bed. Cardboard boxes, some marked ‘bedroom’, some marked ‘clothes’, some marked ‘books’, were stacked haphazardly against the far wall, beside the door.

_I didn’t realise ghosts could accumulate such a lot of crap,_ Skinner mused.

He smelled food. That was another surprise of the spiritual realm: that bacon still existed. Perhaps this place killed two birds with one stone, and served as hell for pigs.

He got up. He was still fully dressed, although his clothes had dried and his shoes had been taken off. They sat beside the bed, so he put them on and made his way out of the bedroom and into a cluttered hallway. Boxes were stacked here too. He followed his nose and came out into a large living space. A sofa and a tv stood before a small fireplace, and opposite that was a long kitchen island, with three barstools pulled up to it. Behind that was the kitchen itself, and Krycek, who was making bacon on a small health grill.

“You want some coffee?” Krycek asked.

Skinner agreed that, yes, he did. He wondered what kind of coffee the spiritual realm offered, and was surprised that it was just a regular roast from a common brand. This was soon followed by the bacon, which Krycek served on a plain white plate.

“I see you got your arm back,” Skinner said.

“Yup.”

“I’m glad that lost limbs are reunited with their owners, here.”

Krycek stared at him in confusion. “Did you get a knock to the head that I’m unaware of?” he said at last.

“No. Just the whole drowning thing.”

“Ok, whatever.” Krycek pinched the bridge of his nose tiredly. “This goes way beyond my expertise. Look, I did a bit of research while you were asleep. There’s a number of different ways that MK Naomi could be introduced to Mud Lick, and none of them include chem trails. There’s a lot of crop spraying that goes on up there – it’s largely an agricultural economy, seasonal hunting not withstanding – which could mean that the food itself is being dosed. But I’m not convinced, because a lot of the cereals and vegetable produce would be exported all over the state, if not the country, and we’re simply not seeing a wider spread of the effects. It seems to be limited to the township itself.

“Water supply is, of course, always an option. It’s fed by a local reservoir, and it’s an effective way of limiting exposure in secondary stages of testing. I’m assuming that, beyond the initial introduction of the gas in Vietnam, that the first stages of testing were conducted in the veteran’s hospital outside the town’s limits. Seems likely, right, that once they were ready to broaden their base of subjects, they would try to keep it contained within established parameters that they could easily monitor.

“However, there’s also the possibility that they didn’t intend to expand it too far. Did you take any crack, or meth, or heroin when you were up there? Smoke anything funny?”

Skinner shook his head four times.

“Ok, so it’s not being tested on addicts or drug users,” Krycek concluded. “It’s probably the water supply. I’ll need a bit of time, but I think I should be able to find out what companies are responsible for maintenance of the reservoir, and for treatment of the water, upkeep of the facility, that kind of thing. Try and trace this back to the source, and find out where it’s being manufactured. Something like this needs better facilities than a back-woods vet’s hospital. And no offence to you guys at the FBI but if this is what you say it is, then I think it’s best that you don’t use any official channels of inquiry. But I’m going to fix this. Leave it to me, and I’ll get back to you.”

“Back to me where?”

Krycek shrugged. “Uh, I dunno. I mean, I know where your office is, but like I said, I think you should keep this out of the FBI for now.” He ran a hand over his chin. “I’ll think of something. I still got a few good contacts that can reach you.”

“On the other side?”

Krycek’s eyes narrowed as cast an appraising look over Skinner. “Are you going to be ok to drive?”

“This is all assuming I want to go back,” Skinner pointed out.

“Well, no offence man, but you’re not staying here.”

“No, not here exactly,” Skinner agreed slowly.

“Yeah. Ok. I’m going to walk you back to your car now. I don’t think I can trust you to make it there in once piece.”

Krycek grabbed his leather jacket and steered Skinner to the door. They stepped out on to the porch, and Skinner realised that Krycek’s medium place house looked exactly like the house at the address someone had given him yesterday. _Strange, that,_ he thought. _They didn’t know that I would die, but they still knew enough to lead me here. Then again, if Alex still has contact with the land of the living, maybe he’s not the only ghost in my afterlife._

The fog had not left. It still rolled in from the lake, and roiled around the air in front of them, swirling at their feet and making the world seem more claustrophobic. Together they walked through it, in silence at first, until Skinner began to speak.

“So what is this place, Alex?” he asked.

Alex shrugged. “Just a place. Nowhere special. Nondescript and discrete.”

“But you never answered my question, from last night. Is it heaven, or is it hell?”

Krycek rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, this again. Walter, can I let you in on a little secret?”

“Of course.”

“There is no heaven or hell.” They reached Skinner’s car, and Krycek turned to him. “Heaven and hell are nothing more than a state of mind, and one that can only be achieved by the living, not the dead. Surround yourself with goodness. Remove toxic people, and toxic relationships from your life, and you will be in heaven. Let bad people into your life, even miserable people who drag you into their misery and steal all the goodness from your heart, and you will be in hell.

“Let go of your grudges, and your bitterness, and don’t dwell on the wrongs other people have done you. It only drags you down, and makes you miserable, and stunts your life, and that is hell. But it is also hell to dwell on the things you have done wrong. To live in perpetual shame, and guilt, and fear. Be a positive person, and do good things for those around you, and in turn you will attract positivity into your life, and that is heaven.

“Just be a good person, treat people how you want to be treated, and believe me: you will live in heaven for the rest of your life. Stop dwelling on what comes next, and focus on making the life you have now, the best life you can lead. Be happy, Walter, and you are in heaven.”

Skinner thought about it, then nodded. “I guess it’s time for me to go back now.” He glanced towards his car. “Leave this place.”

“Dear God, _yes_.”

“Apply the lessons I’ve learned here to the rest of my life.”

“Sure. Ok.”

“Make it the life I want to live, and I will be in heaven.”

“That’s right.”

Skinner turned back to him, and studied his face. He stepped closer. “You know, I’ve always wanted to do this.” He slipped one arm around Krycek’s waist, while his other hand cradled the back of his head, and pulled him into a passionate, deep kiss. Stunned by the turn of events, Krycek let it happen.

After a few short moments Skinner broke the kiss and stepped back. He pushed his hands into his pockets and turned his back on the ghost. Krycek blinked in surprise, and mouthed the words _what the fuck!?_

“Goodbye, Alex Krycek,” Skinner called over his shoulder. “I’m glad that, in death, you found the empathy and compassion I always knew you were capable of.”

Alex shook his head in amusement, and turned to go back to his house.

“Goodbye, Walter Skinner, you beautiful, bald idiot.”

He waited until he heard the car door open and close, the engine start, and the retreat of the car into the fog, before taking out his phone and opening his contacts. He scrolled down to ‘M’, found who he was looking for, and hit the call button.

_“Mulder,”_ said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Hey, did one of you assholes give my address to Skinner? Because he showed up here with one hell of a story. I gotta tell you this, man…”


	3. All Your Base Are Belong to Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex has finally located the facility that carried out the testing of MK Naomi. Gathering Mulder, Walter and Spender together, he leads them on an insane mission to retrieve the vaccine and save Walter's life.

**All Your Base Are Belong to Us**

**Prologue**

Skinner was the first to arrive. He pulled into the layby he’d been directed to, on a deserted old road somewhere out in Tyrrell County, North Carolina, and parked up. He hadn’t passed a single car on the way there, and had seen no lights on the road behind him. He had, as the message asked, dressed in all black, and brought a first aid kit. The message said to wait here, for some ‘friends’ to arrive, and had promised to solve his ‘little problem’. He didn’t know who had sent the message, who his ‘friends’ were, or what ‘little problem’ he had that needed to be solved, but he had a feeling this was something to do with his recently ghostly encounter. Hadn’t the phantom told him that it still had contacts in the land of the living?

It had been three weeks since then. Three weeks since he had died for the fourth time, and managed to come back from the brink again: to walk in a strange world that seemed empty and desolate. Perhaps that was the problem that was being solved. Perhaps this time he would die, and stay dead, and the only witnesses to his passing would be the cold stars above his head, that glinted down on him from the clear sky.

It was so dark, he realized. So far away from civilization, with no artificial lights around to comfort him, the land had descended into blackness. He kept his headlights on, to try and chase away the eerie feeling that someone was watching him.

He remained alone for almost ten minutes. Then, suddenly, lights appeared on the road, growing bigger and brighter the closer they came, and what looked to be some kind of a dark SUV swung in off the road, parking near to him. He got out cautiously, and in the light of the headlights recognized the man who had exited the other vehicle.

“Spender?” he asked, surprise in his voice.

“Skinner?” Spender asked. “What’s this all about?”

Spender was similarly dressed in black, Skinner noticed.

“I have no idea,” Skinner replied. “You didn’t send me a message today?”

“No, but I got one.” Spender waved his phone vaguely. “I was expecting it, but not this soon.”

“Expecting what?” Skinner asked, mystified.

But they didn’t have time to talk further: another car had appeared, coming from the same direction as they had come. Like them, its driver pulled in and parked. To Skinner’s growing confusion Mulder got out of the driver’s seat.

“Is he here yet?” he called over to them.

“No,” Spender replied. “Probably wants to make an entrance.”

“Naw, he’ll be watching somewhere,” Mulder predicted. “You know what he’s like. He’s even more paranoid than me.” He reached them and nodded to them both. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked Skinner, his voice non-confrontational, concerned even. “You must have known I’d help you.”

“Tell you what?” Skinner demanded. He was feeling wrong-footed this way, and he hated feeling like this. Normally he was in complete control, and this situation was as far outside of his control as could be. “I seem to be the only person who doesn’t know why we’re here, or what we’re doing.”

“MK Naomi,” Mulder said. “You never told me you got dosed with it.”

“What _is_ MK Naomi?” Spender asked. “I tried looking it up, but it said that it was an old government project that was discontinued in the 70’s.”

“Not fully,” Mulder said. “Seems that work continued until recently, when they expanded their testing to include a civilian population.”

“What the hell is going on here?” Skinner demanded. “How do you both” –

But again they were interrupted by a car. This time, it came from the opposite direction, driving far too fast. Tires screeched as the driver executed a handbrake turn, dirt and gravel spraying out as the car drifted into the layby, at the far end from them, pointing away from them. They could hear the ticking of the overworked engine from where they stood, as the silence of the night settled back around them.

“Told you he wanted to make an entrance,” Spender muttered.

“No, that’s just how he drives,” Mulder said ruefully.

A figure got out of the car, long legs first, then a tall body unfurling. A lit cigarette dangled from its lips, a plume of smoke enveloping the head. For a moment, Skinner’s stomach twisted uncomfortably. _It can’t be,_ he thought. But no, it couldn’t be the old bastard: the person was younger and had a different, leaner body type. It slammed the door of the car before turning to them, and Skinner’s mouth dropped open as he realized who it was.

“What’s up, nerds?” Alex Krycek said.

**Act One**

Despite his cocky greeting, Krycek approached the group of men with wary caution. Mulder’s face was suitably blank, while Spender radiated uneasiness. Skinner’s face, on the other hand, Alex was pleased to see, was a picture. His mouth was open in shock, eyes wide, his whole body seemed to be frozen along with his face. Alex couldn’t stop his grin spreading at the memory of their last meeting.

“But,” Skinner said, “but, you’re dead.”

“I tried to tell you,” Alex replied. His grin widened even more.

“No, but… I killed you. I put a bullet in your head. You’re dead.”

Alex ducked his head in mock modesty. “Not dead enough, I guess. Call it a case of extreme self-preservation.”

“No, but I, I…” A slow realization, tinged with horror, crossed Skinner’s face as he, too, remembered their last meeting. He covered his face with both of his big hands, hiding from them. _“Oh my God! Oh my Goddddddd!”_ he groaned.

“What’s the matter, Walter?” Alex asked, aware that his grin had gone from spreading, to widening, to completely shit-eating in a very short space of time. “I thought you like-liked me.”

_“Oh dear God, you idiot, you total idiot!”_

Spender and Mulder looked at the two men, then each other, aware that there was something they were missing.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Walter,” Alex said smugly. “It was probably just a reaction to my pretty eyes.”

_“You absolute loser! This is the lowest point of your life!”_

Alex flicked his cigarette away, and suddenly he was all business. “Thank you all for meeting me here. I know that it must have been hard to try and put your own feelings towards me aside, but I’m truly grateful that you agreed to this truce, temporary as it may be.”

_“Oh you idiot! You complete idiot! What have you done?!”_

Alex ignored Walter’s groans. “I know I asked you to leave your weapons at home, but I don’t expect you to have complied with that.”

“Damn right,” Mulder said. He lifted his black jacket and showed the gun at his waist.

“However,” Alex continued, “what we’re doing tonight needs to be untraceable. Therefore, I’ve supplied a small arsenal for us. None of these weapons can be traced back to any of us, and at the end of the night we will dispose of them as a group, if you do not trust me to do it myself. And,” he added quickly, “I do not expect any of you to trust me to do it by myself, so I will not be offended.”

_“Walter you moron! You complete loser! Oh God what is wrong with you!”_

“We’ll just give Walter a few minutes to compose himself. Gentlemen, would you please follow me over here?” Alex led Mulder and Spender over to his car. He popped the boot and revealed a long suitcase and a black duffle bag. He opened both and showed them the weapons he had brought. “I have gloves here, if you need them.”

“Not a problem,” said Mulder, pulling on a pair of soft, black leather gloves. Spender, on the other hand, accepted a pair from Alex.

“I’ll remind you, Mulder,” Alex said, “that each pair of leather gloves is as unique as a fingerprint. Small defects in the leather that the naked eye cannot detect, rips or tears: they can leave prints as effective as your own hands. As such, those gloves will need to be disposed of too.”

Mulder nodded. “I’m aware.”

“Good.” Alex gestured to the bag. “Gentlemen, choose your poison.”

Mulder and Spender hummed and hawed over the bag. Eventually, Mulder selected a Glock, which replaced his own service weapon on his waist, and a small Sig P365 in an ankle holster, which he quickly put on under the leg of his jeans. Spender didn’t seem able to decide, so Alex opened the long case and handed him a rifle.

“Stop fooling,” Spender said dismissively, and tried to give it back.

“Naw, man, it suits you. Keep it. But take a Glock or something too. I, myself, prefer a Colt.” Alex picked up two matching guns and gazed at them lovingly. He also selected a Sig P365, and a long hunting knife, as well as a pair of brass knuckles. After a moment’s hesitation, Mulder also took a set of the knuckles.

“Has Walter calmed down now?” Alex asked absently, as he secreted the guns about his person.

Skinner wandered over to them, his face wan. He managed a nod. It didn’t seem as though he could tear his eyes from Alex, though. He was now completely silent. Alex sighed, grabbed a Saturday Night Special from the duffel bag, and held it out to him.

Skinner accepted it, looked down at it numbly, and then leaned in towards Alex. “When I saw you,” he whispered, “were you dead?”

“No,” Alex whispered back. He didn’t know why they were keeping their voices so low: it was clear that both Mulder and Spender could hear them. “I was definitely alive. Just like you were.” He reached up and patted Walter on the cheek, gently.

Skinner had a haunted look on his face. “But didn’t I… Before I left…?”

Alex tried to stop his laugher from bubbling up again. “Yes, you did.”

_“OH MY GODDDDD!”_ Skinner hid his face again.

Alex rolled his eyes. “Ok, seriously, you gotta knock this off now. Put a pin in it, and beat yourself up later. Or beat yourself off. I don’t care. But you gotta concentrate. We’re not going on a picnic.”

“Nobody’s told me what we’re going on!” Skinner snapped. Now he just looked angry, but at least he had snapped out of his stupor.

Alex blinked, his face innocent. “I didn’t?”

“No! You just dragged me out here in the middle of the night!”

“We’re going to cure you, Walter. I told you: I’m going to fix this.”

“Fix this? Fix what?”

“MK Naomi. I was right: it was in the water, not chem trails. We’re going to go in one car, if that’s ok with you guys.” Alex ignored Walter and scanned their assorted cars. When his eyes fell on Spender’s SUV his eyes lit up with a devilish glint. “Jeffery, what the _eff!”_ He walked straight over to it, and they found themselves following. “You dropping the kids off at soccer after this?”

“What are you talking about?” Spender asked, insulted. “This is a perfectly serviceable vehicle.”

“Yeah, if you’re wearing a velour track suit. You got some velour going on under that windbreaker?”

“It’s not a windbreaker, it – Alex, stop it! Stop it!” Spender pushed Alex’s hands away. “Knock it off.”

“I bet that glass is bullet proof,” Alex said, his attention already diverted. “Shatter proof? Great, we’ll go in this then.”

“Why my car?” Spender groaned.

“Because,” Mulder replied, before Alex could, “it’s a perfectly serviceable vehicle.”

“Gimmie your keys.” Alex held his hand out to Jeffery.

“No. I’m driving, if we’re taking my car.”

“No way. You gotta trust me on this. You do not want to be behind the wheel of this car when we get there. Gunfire is going to be concentrated on the driver. I know what I’m doing, now give me the keys.”

They got in to the car. There was a scramble to get into the back, but not in the seat behind Alex, so Walter found himself up front with the man he had considered his mortal enemy for a great number of years. Although, he had admitted, many years ago now that feeling had faded considerably. He wasn’t at all surprised he could bear to be so close to the man. Embarrassment aside.

“ _Aw man, it’s got eight seats. For God’s sake Jeffery._ Ok, this is going to be dangerous.” Now they were all inside the car, Alex had turned serious again. He took out a cigarette and lit it. “If you agree to do this” –

“No,” Spender said flatly. He had found himself in the unenviable position behind Alex, vulnerable to any stray bullets that could manage to penetrate the thick glass.

“No what?”

“You’re not smoking in my car. No way. I’ve had enough of that to last a lifetime.”

Alex hit a button and the window whirred to life, and lowered itself. “I’ll smoke out the window,” he said pointedly.

“No, Alex, get out of the damned car.”

With a put-upon sigh, Alex got out of the car. He leaned down, his arms braced on the open window, and smoked through it as he talked.

“As I was saying, this is going to be dangerous. If you all agree to – _Oh my God, Jeffery, what now?!”_

“You’re getting smoke and ash all over the inside of my car!”

“Oh for God’s sake, just let him in!” Mulder groaned.

“It doesn’t matter, Jeffery, it’s already in the damned car!” Skinner said loudly.

“Fine! Fine! But I want to register my disapproval of this!”

“Noted,” Alex snapped, as he swung himself back in. “Jesus Christ, you are the _worst._ Can I please finish what I was saying? It’s kind of important.”

He glared around at them, and they nodded, although Jeffery looked like he was sulking.

“Good. Ok. _As I was saying.”_ He shot a glare back at Jeffery as he scooched around in his seat, the better to address them all. “This is going to be dangerous. The facility we’re about to enter is responsible for a number of sub-projects the government, and presumably the old man, have been working on for decades. It’s remoteness, however, and lack of notoriety, has given the administrators and staff a false feeling of safety. Surprise will be our greatest weapon, at least initially. Once we are in, we have limited time before they can augment their defenses and call for backup. The closest military base is in Pope Field, so should they be able to get a distress call out to them, we will only have around an hour and a half to complete this, before assistance comes by air.

“Our primary goal is to access the secondary laboratories and, with luck, a vaccine against the effects of MK Naomi. It is being stored inside the facility, on the ground floor, in the east wing of the building. There will be a skeletal team of scientists and research staff inside that lab, as well as a skeletal team of general staff within the facility itself. There will also be a number of guards, but I don’t anticipate an overwhelming force. As I said, they have been lulled into a false sense of security over the last couple of decades, due to the remoteness of the location, and the lack of public knowledge about the facility. We are not in a population center: there will be no civilians caught in the crossfire.”

“Crossfire?” Mulder asked.

Alex took a deep breath. “Gentlemen, I need you to leave your morals at the door. Please believe me when I say that the people inside that facility are complicit with the work being carried out there. From the lowliest receptionist, to the top administrators and scientists: they are aware of the work they do, and they engage in it willingly. None of them are being held hostage and forced to work there. I understand that aspects of this mission may seem… distasteful to you. I can only assure you that, should something go wrong and we have to engage our weapons, no matter who you shoot you are engaging with a hostile force that has been perpetrating crimes against the American people. And not just American: some of these biological weapons have been used against civilians in foreign wars and skirmishes too, as a means of testing the effects.

“If you feel that you cannot do this; if you feel that you are unable to defend yourself, or one of us, against any of these people; if you feel that you cannot approach this ethically rather than morally… in short, if you cannot fire upon those guards and civilians, you need to get out of this car now. I won’t stop you, and I’m sure none of us will think any less of you. This is my operation, and we need to do it my way, or we will fail. Jeffery, where the hell are you going?”

Jeffery got out of the car. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

“Get your ass back in here!”

“Alex, what you’re talking about… it’s a terrorist assault on a government facility!”

“We’re not terrorists,” Alex cried, offended. “Are you kidding me?” He followed Jeffery out of the car. “We’re the good guys! They’re the ones bombing other countries and poisoning their own people! We’re going in there to help! Now get your ass back into this car, you coward!”

“You said you wouldn’t think any less of us if we didn’t go!”

“I didn’t say all that for your benefit, you dork! I was saying it for Walter!”

“What?” Walter asked, confused. He got out of the car, so he could talk to Alex better.

“Oh, come on,” Alex cried, “you’re the only one of us still in law enforcement!”

“Hey!” said Mulder, hoping out of the car next. “I’m still an FBI agent!”

“Well, he’s the only one who still has morals and whatnot.”

“I resent that!”

“Look, shut up!” Alex shouted. “Everybody get back in the damn car! _Jesus Christ, it’s like herding cats,”_ he muttered.

They got back in.

“Ok, primary goal,” Alex said, “is to get in, get the vaccine, and get out. With as little bloodshed as possible. That alright with everyone?”

“Primary goal,” said Jeffery.

Alex groaned.

“No, you said primary goal. What’s our secondary goal?”

Alex looked shifty. “I’m not going to lie to you.”

He stopped talking.

They waited a few minutes, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

“You know, normal people keep talking after they say that,” Mulder said pointedly. “They usually follow it up with the truth, too.”

“I said I wasn’t going to lie to you,” Alex said. “What, you want me to lie? Fine, there’s no secondary goal.”

“Alex, what else is in that facility?” Walter demanded.

“Ok, fine.” Alex held his hands up. “There’s another reason for this. There’s something else going on in there that I –“

The other three groaned and got out of the car, grumbling generally.

_“Drag my ass out here –“_

_“I knew he wasn’t being straight with us.”_

_“Goddamn it, Krycek, why do you have be like this?”_

Alex got out. “Alright, I’m sorry. But there’s another experiment being carried out there. I wanna stop it.”

“Why?” Skinner snapped. “What’s in it for you?”

Alex shook his head. “There’s nothing in it for me. I don’t expect you to believe me, or to trust me, but… They have children in there. As test subjects. I don’t think it’s fair to leave them behind. I want to get them out too.”

“That’s a load of crap!” Mulder said. “Be straight with us, huh? For once in your damned life.”

“I am being straight!” Alex insisted. He turned an open, innocent face to them. “I’m telling you the truth.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in the ass,” said Skinner. He turned to Mulder and Spender. “Alright. Let’s take a vote. I don’t expect either of you to compromise yourselves on my behalf. But if Alex isn’t lying about the vaccine, I have to go. I’m going to die without it, so I have nothing to lose. You both have lives. Mulder, you have a baby on the way.”

“Oh! Congratulations!” Spender said to Mulder.

“Thanks man.”

“You have a career in the FBI” –

“Well…” Mulder made a noncommittal noise.

“You have a stable relationship with Scully for the first time in years, and a chance to live a normal life. Jeffery, you… also have a life.” Skinner paused, embarrassed the he had nothing else to follow that up with. “Both of you think hard about this. I would advise you both to walk away, but I won’t make the decision for you.”

“I’m in,” Mulder said, resolute. “You’ve put your ass on the line for me and Scully more times than I can count. I think it’s time to return the favor.”

They turned to Spender, who sighed. “I guess I’m in,” he said. “Although God knows why we’re listening to Alex Krycek.”

“Because,” said Alex, a sly smile on his face, “you like-like me.” He shot a knowing look at Skinner, who bared his teeth in a snarl.

They all got back into the SUV.

Alex pulled out of the layby and turned in to the road, pointing the car in the direction he had come from. “We got about a half an hour until we reach it,” he warned. “Everyone get ready. It’s show time.”

**Act Two**

They drove steadily for about an hour. They were all quiet. In the backseat, Mulder was wondering why he was here. Oh, of course he would have done this for Skinner. He admired the man in spite of the fact that he was Mulder’s boss. When Skinner pulled rank, annoying and frustrating as it was, he did so for a reason, usually in an attempt to try and save his agents’ asses from some unknown threat to either their lives or their careers. He was a good man, and he had been good to both Mulder and Scully over the years. He had earned Mulder’s respect time and time again, and Mulder knew that he would break into a thousand facilities to help save Walter Skinner’s life. That wasn’t what he was questioning.

Why was he here with Alex Krycek, of all people? When Krycek had called him with this crazy-ass story Mulder knew he should have taken over, done the research himself, and conducted the resultant action without Krycek. Krycek was a loose cannon: an unknown quantity. He always had been. At first he’d been friendly and witty, but once that mask had been dropped he’d revealed himself to be a coldhearted son of a bitch, who was only concerned with himself and his own survival. Whereas Mulder had turned his back on the idea of working with the Conspiracy, Alex appeared to have embraced it, and the resulting life, lived out in real-time before their eyes, had shown the disastrous consequences of that choice.

_But,_ he thought to himself, _that ghost hunt had been fun. Scully was right about that._

He had, against all odds, enjoyed himself. It had almost been like the old days, when Krycek was still pretending to be the green agent. Willingly going along with all the weirdness, accepting it easily and making his own leaps of imagination. That was one of the worst parts of the initial betrayal, after Scully’s abduction, of course. And Dwayne Barry’s death. And the death of the tram operator at Skyland Mountain – they’d never even recovered his body. And, of course, Krycek trying to knock Mulder off the top of a moving high-wire tram.

But besides all the murders and back-stabbing, one of the things that had stung the most was the simple fact that Mulder had _liked_ Alex. They’d worked well together, they’d gelled well together, and Mulder had thought they were developing a friendship. If Alex hadn’t been such a treacherous bastard, Mulder believed that he could have become the younger agent’s mentor. And it would have been something he would have enjoyed doing.

He found himself looking at Krycek’s face in profile. He still had that expression of innocent openness, the one that put people at ease around him. Well, right now he did. Mulder had seen that expression darken into something less welcoming. Not exactly feral, but controlled malevolence. He tried to hold on to _that_ image instead.

“Ethics,” he said aloud. Something had prodded at the back of his mind.

Krycek ignored him, but Spender gave him a quizzical look, while Skinner called back, “What was that, Mulder?”

“You said ‘ethically’, Krycek,” Mulder clarified. “Not morally.”

“Yeah,” said Alex. He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “You gotta look at this ethically, instead of morally.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, morally killing anyone is wrong, right? But ethically, if you kill someone who’s bad, or doing something bad – evil in this case, let’s face it – that’s ok. Morals is what society tells us is right, while ethics are our own innate sense of justice.”

“I don’t remember you being a fountain of moral _or_ ethical behavior,” Mulder said. “When the hell did you pick this up?”

“Oh. I started watching The Good Place recently.” Alex shot a wicked grin at Skinner, who groaned in response. “It’s a really good show,” he added, his voice low. “Thanks for the recommendation.”

“What the hell happened out at the Lake that night?” Spender asked, mystified.

“Oh, I gotta tell you this,” Alex said. “Right when he was leaving –“

“Krycek,” Skinner growled. “I will kill you.”

“Ok, maybe not.” Alex put his foot down on the accelerator and stopped talking. Once again, the good humour fled from his face, and he was all business.

“Going kind of fast there,” Spender said nervously.

“We’re almost there,” Krycek said by way of explanation. “Shouldn’t be too long now.”

“How are we getting in?” Mulder asked. “We going to hide the car and get in the back way? Assuming there is a back way?”

“Nope.”

More speed. On the horizon ahead, Mulder could begin to make out the facility. It was a short, low building, with two stories in total visible above ground, surrounded by a wire fence. In the middle of the road stood a barrier, with a guard’s booth on the right-hand side of it.

Alex put his foot down further. Mulder doubted the SUV had ever seen speeds like this under Jeffery’s careful handing. The building shot towards them.

“I thought we were using the element of surprise!” Mulder cried, as they were almost upon the barrier.

“We are!” Alex replied happily. “It’s going to be a big fuckin’ surprise when we do this!”

They hit the barrier. Somehow it didn’t slice through the car and kill them all. Instead, it flew off completely, spinning to the right from the force of their impact. The car jolted horribly, and Mulder had a clear view from his window of the guard’s horrified face.

“He’s on the phone, Alex,” he called, his tone a warning.

“Don’t worry, this part’s _really_ going to surprise him,” Alex said serenely. Against all judgement, he put his foot down again, somehow dragging reserves of speed from the cumbersome vehicle, and smashed straight through the front doors.

They all braced themselves as, finally, Alex slammed on the brakes. Tires screeched as they slid straight through the entrance lobby. Skinner cried out, wordlessly, and reached out for the wheel, but Alex slapped his hand away. Ahead of them was a reception desk, with a woman stood behind it. She watched them, her mouth and eyes wide in horror, as they skidded towards her. They hit the desk and crushed her against it, the SUV, and the wall behind her. She collapsed over the hood of the SUV, blood pouring from her mouth.

“Jesus Christ!” Skinner cried. “Jesus _Christ!”_

They all scrambled out of the SUV. Alex’s face was still completely serene. The death didn’t seem to have bothered him at all. He turned around, his gun already in his hand, and saw that the guard outside had abandoned both his post and, thankfully, the phone, and was running towards them. Alex seemed to aim automatically. He pulled the trigger, the Colt bucked in his hand, and the guard, still fumbling for his own weapon, fell to the ground dead.

“What the hell was that?” Mulder and Skinner were in his face quickly.

“Jesus, Alex, did you have to kill her?” Mulder demanded.

“I told you,” he said calmly, his face a blank mask now, “they are all complicit. None of these people are innocent.” He shrugged out of their grasp. “If you have a problem with doing things my way then fine, stay in the damned car and I’ll get you on the way out. But I am going in there, and I am going to finish this. And don’t use my name again. In fact, don’t use any of our names.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just walked around them and headed for the east wing of the facility. Mulder and Skinner exchanged a look, then followed him. Spender, holding the rifle awkwardly in front of him, almost like a shield, trailed after them.

When they caught up to Alex he didn’t seem surprised to see them. He tucked one of his guns into his belt and took a small card out of a pocket in his jacket. He scanned it through an electronic sensor and the huge double-doors clicked and slid open, admitting them to the laboratories. When they slid closed again, Alex went to a keypad on a wall beside them and punched in a long code. When it beeped, the keypad flashed red three times before settling back to its usual blue.

“That should hold them up for a bit,” he muttered.

“Where are we going?” Mulder asked, his voice low.

“Straight ahead,” Krycek answered. “But we got to round up these others first.” He gestured to the rooms on either side. “We should secure them all in one room, and make sure none of them manage to get a message out.”

It was surprisingly easy to do so. They had, as Alex predicted, taken the facility completely by surprise. There were two labs in this front part of the east wing – the primary labs, Alex called them – and they were only staffed by skeletal crews. They divided into two – Alex and Mulder, Skinner and Spender – and took one each. In Mulder’s there were only three people: a woman and two men, one of which looked to be in his early twenties, and who was surprisingly stubborn about being separated from a tissue sample he had been intently studying through a microscope. They met Skinner and Spender, who were forcing another two people ahead at gunpoint, out in the corridor, and approached the second set of doors, which led to the secondary labs. Again, Alex used his swipe card to gain access and their hostages were sent through ahead of them. When the doors closed, he once again punched a long code into the inside keypad, which again flashed red three times. An extra security measure, Mulder figured. Something that would take time to override, perhaps, unless one had high enough clearance. And who, at this time of the night, would be on-base with high enough clearance?

There were another two labs here, and while Spender and Skinner herded all of the hostages into the one on the right, where Alex had told them to go, while Mulder and Alex gathered up another two people from the lab opposite and brought them over. Once everyone was in the lab, Alex ordered the hostages to go over to the corner by the two outer walls, and kneel down with their hands behind their heads. There were ten of them all together.

“We don’t want to kill anyone,” Skinner began.

“I do,” Alex interrupted.

“Ok, so, most of us don’t want to kill anyone,” Skinner continued. “We’re looking for something. As soon as we get it, we’ll leave and you can all go back to work.”

Alex approached the hostages, and put his gun to the head of one of the older men. “There is a vaccine,” he said, his voice clear but low, “developed here, to protect you all against a chemical agent named MK Naomi which was also developed here. Where is it?”

The hostages stayed quiet. Some looked fearful, others puzzled, but the two people that had been in the lab when Spender and Skinner had brought the hostages in, a man and a woman who both looked to be middle aged, looked mutinous.

Alex pulled the trigger. The older man’s head exploded under his gun, and he collapsed sideways, onto the younger man, who gave a shrill shout. The others couldn’t stop their panicked cries either, but soon quietened down when Alex barked an order at them to shut up.

Mulder had instinctively taken a step towards Alex, but stopped when Alex shot a look at him. “My way,” he reminded Mulder. And Mulder reluctantly nodded and stepped back. _These people aren’t innocent,_ he reminded himself. _They are responsible for whatever is killing Skinner. They are responsible for other crimes too. No court would convict them, no justice agency would arrest them._

But he could see that he wasn’t alone in how he felt. Skinner, in particular, looked tight-faced and grim, his lips pressed together so that they had almost disappeared. Spender had turned pale.

“Who was working in here?” Alex had turned to Skinner.

Skinner shook his head.

“Do you want to die?” Alex inquired. “Is that it? Is it worth it, so that these people can continue doing what they do? Destroying lives, undermining the country? If that’s what you want, then just say the word, and we will all turn around and walk out of here.”

Wordlessly, Skinner pointed out the man and the woman. Alex turned back to them and put his gun to the man’s head. “Where’s the vaccine?” he asked again.

The man’s mouth moved, but no words came out. He gulped and tried again. “I’m just a scientist.”

“I don’t care,” Alex replied. “Where’s the vaccine?”

“Just tell them!” another one of the hostages cried. It was a woman who was sitting near the outside of the group, one of the first ones they had collected up from the primary labs. “For God’s sake, just give them what they want!”

“We have orders,” the female scientist said. She bit the words out reluctantly, and took a heaving breath that made her chest rise and fall in a shuddering motion.

“Now you got new orders,” Alex said silkily. He turned his gun on her, and placed it against her forehead. “Where’s the vaccine?”

“Just tell him, Michelle,” the other woman hissed.

“Where the hell is your loyalty, Claire?” Michelle hissed back.

“You should have thought about loyalty when you screwed my husband!”

Alex’s face lit up. He looked as though all his Christmases had come at once. “Michelle!” he cried. “Michelle, you messy bitch! I _love_ the drama!”

“Goddamn it, Claire!” Michelle’s face grew pale and tight.

“I guess there’s no love lost between you two?” Alex asked. His arm turned and, without taking his eyes off Michelle, he shot Claire between the eyes. Behind him, Spender groaned aloud.

“That was a present, Michelle, because I appreciate the entertainment.” Alex returned his gun to her head. “I already know the old fart here,” he gestured at the other middle-aged scientist with his head, “knows where the vaccine is too. That means you are losing your usefulness. Now, let’s try again. Where’s the vaccine?”

She nodded, and tried to moisten her bottom lip. “I’ll get it for you,” she croaked.

“Get up,” he said, his voice now deadly in its softness. He took a step back to give her the space she needed to awkwardly scramble off her knees. She took her hands off her head and, holding them out from her sides, she walked over to a row of cabinets and cupboards. She pointed up at one of the presses that were set into the wall, above the cabinets. “I need a stool,” she said, her voice shaking.

“Go get one,” Alex said.

She nodded, turned, and took a hold of one of the stools that stood at a central table that was cluttered with the debris of whatever they had been working on before the invasion. She walked back to the cabinet and, in one smooth motion, turned and _flung_ the stool at Alex. He ducked out of the way easily enough, just as Skinner’s gun went off. The bullet hit Michelle in the chest, and she fell back, collapsing onto the row of cabinets. She slipped sideways and fell to the ground. Blood bubbled out over her lips as she gave a last, rattling breath, and died.

“Thanks man,” Alex said to Skinner. Skinner simply nodded his head and went to the cabinet. His movements were jerky as he reached up, opened it, and tugged down the boxes from the shelves within. He searched through them, then finally held up a long, white, plastic package.

“Got it,” he said, his voice low.

“Great. We’re almost done then. I’ll be right back.” Alex made as though to leave the room.

“No way,” Mulder said at once. “I don’t trust you, Alex. I’m coming with you.”

Alex shrugged. “Ok. Anyone else want to come?”

“I’m not letting Mulder go anywhere with you alone,” Skinner said. He moved over to join them.

“Can we get out of here now?” Spender asked.

“Naw, you stay here,” Alex said. “Someone’s gotta guard these losers.”

“Oh come on!” Spender complained. “You can’t leave me here by myself!”

Alex put his left hand on Jeffery’s shoulder, his face serious. “I believe in you,” he intoned solemnly.

“Well, can I at least use a normal gun? I don’t like this rifle.”

“Why’d you bring it then?”

“You forced it on me!”

“You really need to learn how to be more assertive,” Mulder advised.

Spender huffed and put the rifle down on the central table. Pulling out the Glock Alex had given him earlier, he looked more comfortable as he settled in to guard the remaining hostages.

“Where now?” Mulder asked.

“Down,” Alex replied. “Underneath the facility.” He led them down to the elevator, but paused and took the stairs instead. They moved quietly as he briefed them, his voice carefully low. “There’s another section of labs down here, where they do the worst of their tests. I got some good information that they’re using a group of children from one of their breeding houses as subjects.”

“Breeding houses?” Skinner asked. His voice conveyed his disgust.

Alex nodded. “It’s where they grow their clones, and work on a hybrid continued even after Cassandra Spender’s death. She was just the first, but she was too old to be controlled by them. They decided that growing one from scratch would be better. Brainwash it from birth, and create the perfect operative. Beyond that, they experiment with other genetic material. Trying to create new evolutions of the human race, augmented with alien technology. Kind of like how they build their new spaceships using recovered alien tech.”

“Reverse engineering,” Mulder muttered.

“Well, if this ‘Spartan Virus’ is the real deal, I guess they were going to need new subjects to repopulate the earth with. Why let over fifty years of research go to waste? Here we are.”

They had reached the bottom of the stairs. Silently, Alex counted them down from five and, at his signal, they burst in. They needn’t have worried though: there were just two guards, who Alex dispatched himself before Mulder and Skinner were through the doors, and one scientist, who looked up at them from his seat at a desk, horrified at the sudden intrusion.

“You can’t” – he began, but Alex flipped his gun and used the butt as a club, stunning the man quickly and efficiently.

“Yes, we can,” he growled. He dug back into his jacket and pulled out a different keycard than the one he had used upstairs. He quickly went to the outer door of the lab and used it. It beeped once, then whirred as the door opened smoothly, swinging outwards towards them to reveal the dimly lit corridor beyond. It was much shorter than the one above, and contained four doors on either side, eight in total. There were no observation windows that showed them the inside of the rooms, unlike the labs above.

Each door had a scanner and a keypad. Alex quickly began to scan the card and punch in a code, moving on before the last door had opened fully. Mulder went to the first door he had opened and peered inside. It was dark, but he could make out a hospital bed surrounded by medical equipment. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could finally see a small, pale face peering at him from under the blanket on the bed.

“Jesus,” he whispered softly. “He was right.” He could feel Skinner behind him, and hear the man’s huff of anger and distaste.

“We have to get them out of here,” Skinner said grimly.

Mulder nodded. He cautiously went inside the room. It was small, he noticed. Almost cell like. No windows either: not unexpected considering they were below ground. It seemed that the child was being held in a prison, rather than a hospital. _This is what they can do,_ he thought hopelessly. _They can do this, and get away with it, and nobody will stand up to them._

“Hey,” he said softly. “Hi there. My name is Fox. Can you walk?”

The child nodded, and now that Mulder was close enough he could see that it was a little girl, perhaps six or seven years old. Small, and undernourished. Her hair was very dark, and her dark eyes stood out against her pale skin. He wondered if she had ever seen the sunlight.

“We’re going to get you out of here. Do you want that?”

“Free?” she asked, her voice a high-pitched whisper.

“Free,” he agreed.

She leapt out of the bed, faltered for a second – he could see the uncertainty on her face – before she ran to the door. She carefully stepped around Skinner and out into the dim light beyond. Mulder followed her. Alex was standing behind Skinner, watching them both. A group of children, all as dark haired and pale skinned as the little girl, were clustered around him.

“Now we go,” Alex said softly.

Mulder nodded. “Now we go,” he repeated.

Suddenly, above them and all around them, a siren wailed out. They jumped and looked around: the scientist had come to, struggled upright, and pulled an alarm on the wall. Whereas the light had been dim, now it turned red and began to flash.

“You can’t take them,” he said, his voice pleading with them. “You don’t understand!”

“We understand,” Skinner growled. Alex began to raise his gun, but before he could aim it properly Mulder had already pulled his own trigger, twice. The second shot had been superfluous, although it hit its target. But the first bullet had buried itself in the man’s forehead.

“We don’t have much time now,” Alex warned. “An hour and a half before the first wave gets here by plane from Pope Field, and whatever guards are here will know exactly where in the building we are now. We have to get out of here. Now.”

**Act Three**

They took the stairs back up to the next level, hurrying this time, careless of the noise they made. The alarm had already given away their position, although Mulder thought that the car through the front door may also have given the security staff a head’s up. They piled into the upstairs corridor, with Mulder and Skinner doing their best to keep the children behind them in case they were met with guards. There were no guards yet, although they could hear the shouting of a number of men on the other side of the electronic doors. Clearly, they had managed to access the corridor of the primary labs, but had been held up by the second set of security measures.

They were approaching the lab where Spender was holding the hostages when things took yet another turn south. Jeffery, relief clear on his face, went to the door to meet them. Mulder heard Alex roar _“Get back!”_ before Skinner bodily pushed him backwards. Inside the room, from the corner of his eye, he could see through the observation window as one of the hostages lunge forward and grabbed the rifle Jeffery had left on the central table. In slow motion, it seemed, he saw Jeffery begin to turn before the rifle went off, its blast deafening inside the building. He saw Jeffery buckle suddenly, and a spray of blood splattered the glass of the lab’s door. Any shout of surprise or pain was drowned by the noise of the gun.

Things began to move faster. He saw Alex step up to the observation window and slam the side of his gun against it, shaking the glass. The person with the rifle pivoted on his heel and fired again, but Alex had stepped back and to the side, out of sight, his left arm up to protect his face as the window exploded out. But the rifle seemed to jam, and as the hostage struggled to force the gun to work again, Alex calmly stepped back to the window and began to fire, a Colt in each hand. He took down the gunman first, then systematically began to shoot the rest of the hostages. He was fast, faster than Skinner, who only reached him and pulled him away when the last of the hostages was dead.

Skinner was apoplectic as he got in Alex’s face, shouting that they were unarmed and non-combatants. That Alex was no better than them. That this was a mistake, and Skinner’s life wasn’t worth all this death. Alex nodded, saying nothing, reloaded his gun, and silenced Skinner when he simply glanced over at the huddled group of children and smiled warmly.

“Almost free,” he promised them. “Stay back, won’t you?”

The children huddled closer together, and shuffled back a few steps. Some of them were looking fearfully at Skinner, as though afraid that he had changed his mind and would put them back in their cells. It took the bluster from Walter, who looked as though air had been let out of his body. He visibly deflated, Mulder saw.

“They’re going to come through that door,” Mulder warned Alex.

Alex continued to ignore Skinner. He simply walked around the man and went to Jeffery, who had managed to crawl out of the room. “Ok buddy,” he said, squatting down beside Spender, “where’d you get hit?”

“My arm,” Spender said, gasping in pain. His face was very white now.

“Be funny if it was your left. Oh hey, it is!” Alex looked at Mulder and cackled. “He got hit in his left arm!”

“Hurts.”

“Yup, hurts like a bitch. You able to get up? Come on, lean on me, that’s it. No man left behind: isn’t that what they say?”

“Who says that?”

“I dunno. Some guy, I guess.” Alex helped Jeffery back to where Skinner and Mulder stood. “You still able to use your gun hand?” he asked Spender, who nodded. “Good. They’re coming through those doors, and we need to be ready.”

“Into one of the labs?” Mulder suggested.

Alex shrugged. “Better cover than nothing.”

“We have to do something about those children,” Skinner said. “We can’t let them get hit.”

“Any ideas?” Mulder asked.

Skinner sighed. “I guess… Turn a table and let them hide behind it? Better than nothing, and it’ll keep them out of the firing line.”

“Better than nothing,” Alex agreed.

But it was too late. Clearly, someone had gotten impatient at being locked out of the secondary labs, because in the next second there was a loud roaring, followed by a glut of fire and a blast that almost threw them off their feet. As it was, they all dropped down to their hunkers, faces turned away from the sudden heat from the controlled blast that blew the doors open. The corridor filled with smoke, and they began to cough and choke. When their hearing came back, all they could hear was the sound of the children screaming shrilly.

Shadowy figures moved within the smoke, heavy feet coming their way. Mulder squinted against the curling, smoldering plumes, but his eyes were watering and it was hard to get a bead on anything. Then, he was dimly aware of a jostling rush all around him, as the screaming children surged forward and fell on the guards. At least, that’s what he _thought_ had happened. It was hard to see for sure, but the larger shadows – the shadows that could have been the guards – were suddenly being felled, or had sprouted small lumps that had jumped on them.

Something warm sprayed across the four men, and Mulder heard Alex swear, his voice awed. Again, it was too hard to see, but it almost looked as though a small girl had ripped out a grown man’s throat with her bare teeth.

When the guards were somehow dead – _this is not happening, this can’t be happening,_ Mulder thought to himself – they got to their feet and followed the trail of carnage. The children hadn’t stopped in their corridor. They’d gone on further, and now clear of the invasive smoke they could see what was happening.

Both medical staff and the few guards that had remained behind as back-up were fighting a losing battle. The children had seized anything they could – scalpels, shards of broken glass, syringes – and had launched themselves on the remaining staff. They gouged and bit and one little boy, who looked to be barely older than a five-year-old, was raking what appeared to be claws down the face of a screaming nurse. Another little girl was sitting straddling the chest of a man, beating him to death with the butt of a fallen rifle while she howled her war cry.

“What the hell?” Skinner asked, aghast at the mayhem they beheld.

“Uh, get to the car?” Alex suggested. “I think we should get out of here.” He dug into his jeans pockets and tossed the car keys to Skinner. “If they follow, they follow. If they don’t… I’m actually not too worried about them. I think they can handle themselves.”

“Yeah, but can the world handle them?” Mulder asked.

No time to think about that. They surged onwards, making for the car. Luckily, it hadn’t sustained any major damage. Well, the grill was chewed up, and it took a few precious minutes to prise the remains of the desk and the dead receptionist off of it, but the engine groaned into life when Skinner turned the keys. They piled into it: Mulder rode shotgun beside Skinner, while Alex forced Spender into the back, into the seat behind Skinner. Then, he began to jimmy with the back row of three seats, laying them down to make the trunk bigger. The wisdom of this was appreciated when the kids suddenly appeared, milling around him uncertainly. He ordered them in before closing down the trunk and hoping in behind Mulder.

He made a surprised noise when he turned towards Jeffery and saw one of the children: a sweet-looking little girl with blood on her perfectly normal looking hands, smiling up at him happily from the seat she occupied, between himself and Spender.

“Ew! I mean, uh, hey sweetie. You don’t wanna go back with your little friends?”

“No thank you,” she said politely.

“Ok. Well, put your seatbelt on, hunny. We have to drive real fast now.”

“Ok!”

Skinner threw the SUV into reverse and they gunned out of the building. He swung the vehicle around when he reached outside, jolting over the debris of the destroyed front entrance and praying that no glass punctured their tires. Finally, narrowly missing the body of the first dead guard, he had the car pointed towards the road and freedom. He put his foot down and they were gone, roaring off into the night.

“You got anything to stop Jeffery’s bleeding?” Alex called up to Mulder.

“Glove box,” Spender said weakly.

Mulder dug around inside it, finally pulling out a half a pack of Shamwows and throwing them back to Alex. Alex caught them, but found he couldn’t reach Jeffery’s left arm properly, especially not with the little girl in the seat between them.

“I’ll do it,” she said happily, snatching two of the pads from Alex’s hands. She turned back to Jeffery, humming to herself and pressed them over the wound in his arm. Luckily, the bullet appeared to have missed anything major, and although he was still bleeding heavily it was a clean shot that could be treated easily.

“What are we doing with those kids, Alex?” Skinner called back.

“I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Uh, any way the FBI could sort them out?”

“Don’t worry about us,” the little girl said sweetly. She turned her head so that she could look at Alex, and blinked twice. Alex, his face locking into a rictus of fear and horror, barely heard the other children taking up the refrain.

“We know where to go.”

“We’re going the right way.

“We’ll tell you when we get there.”

“We _always_ know the way.”

Mulder looked back, and caught sight of Alex’s face. “You alright?”

When the little girl had blinked, she had done so in a very unusual way. Prior to this, Alex had assumed that one’s eyelids closed downwards. But not this little girl. Her eyes held a thin film of translucent skin on either side of the eyeballs, under the skin of her face, which had contracted to slide over her very dark – black, in fact, now that Alex was close enough to see them – eyes, meeting in the middle.

He made a noise. _“eeeeeeeh.”_

“What?” Mulder said. “What’s wrong?”

The little girl turned to him. “He’s being silly!” she declared, and closed her eyes as she wrinkled up her nose. Alex could see Mulder’s eyes open wider as his face froze into a grin, his teeth bared.

_“eeeeeeh,”_ said Mulder.

“What’s wrong?” Skinner asked his eyes still trained on the road ahead. Luckily, Spender lay with his head back and his eyes closed.

“Nothing,” said Mulder quickly.

“Nothing at all,” Alex agreed. “Why would there be something wrong nothing’s wrong shut up.”

“What the…?” Skinner tried to turn back, but Mulder stopped him.

“Eye’s ahead, Skin-Man.”

“Don’t call me that, Mulder.”

They were about half way back to their cars when the children took up the cry.

“Pull over, we’re here, we’re here!”

They were still on a deserted road. Corn fields stood on both sides of them, the crop high and waving in the slight breeze, nodding forwards and back against the starry black sky.

“Stop the car,” Mulder said.

“We can’t stop here,” Skinner began to insist, but Alex’s head appeared in the space between the two front seats.

“Stop the damn car!” he hissed.

“Do as he says,” Mulder insisted.

With a noise of protest, Skinner pulled over onto the side of the road. The children whooped with joy as the little girl beside Alex and Spender scrambled over Alex to open the door. Then, the rest poured over the back of the seats and tumbled merrily out onto the road. Alex and Mulder got out after them and watched as they gamboled and skipped over the fence and into the corn field. Before she clambered after them, the little girl came back and tugged on Alex’s hand, indicating that he should bend down. He squatted down on his hunkers and she leaned in and whispered something in his ear. Then, she turned and followed her friends into the cornfield, their passing marked by heavier swaying of the crops. Soon, they were so far out the two men couldn’t even see that against the blackness of the night, and the sounds of their voices died off.

“What did she say?” Mulder asked.

Alex shook his head. “Something suitably creepy and mysterious.”

They stood for a moment or two longer, watching the corn field for any more weirdness. Eventually, Alex leaned in towards Mulder and said, his voice low, “I vote we call it a win, but we never, _ever,_ speak about this again.”

“Agreed,” said Mulder. They both climbed back into the SUV, and soon they were gone from the corn field too. As they put more space between them and that spot, they missed the sudden glow of light, appearing to shoot down from the sky, off into the distance.

**xxx**

It was a quiet ride back to the cars after that. Alex carefully tended to Spender’s wounds as best he could in the back of the car, trying not to jolt him too badly when the busted suspension caused them to bounce wildly against each other. Eventually, they made it back to the layby, and it was a good thing they had, because they could tell from the protesting noises the SUV’s engine was making that it was close to collapsing on them.

Once out of the car, with Jeffery carefully propped against Alex’s car, Skinner, Mulder and Alex began stripping down the guns they used.

“Hey Jeff,” Alex called, “can this car be traced back to you?”

“You think I’m an idiot?” Jeffery replied, indignantly. “Hell no, there’s no paper trail. I’ve gone to great lengths to keep my name off anything, and stay off the radar.”

“’Kay. I’m gonna burn it out then. Ok?”

Jeffery groaned. “Do you have to?”

“Well, you ain’t driving yourself anywhere tonight, and it can’t drive you anywhere probably ever again, and we need to get rid of the evidence. So yeah, I have to.”

They heard Jeffery sigh, and saw him nod his head tiredly, so they began to pile the pieces of their guns into the back of the SUV. Alex went to the trunk of his car and returned to with a can of gasoline, which he poured liberally over the car’s upholstery. Next, he stood back, lit a cigarette, and tossed it into the inside of the car. It was beginning to burn merrily as they trudged over to Jeffery.

“I gotta go to the hospital,” Jeffery declared. “Someone’s gotta drive me, though.”

“You can come back to mine if you want,” Alex offered. “I think I can dig out that bullet and cauterize the wound myself.”

“What? No, Jesus, Alex, no, _no.”_

“Ok, fine,” Alex said with a tut. “Hop in and I’ll take you to the hospital.” He helped Jeffery into the passenger seat before turning back to Walter and Mulder. “Well, gentlemen, it’s been fun. Sort of. Don’t stick around too long. Military’s going to hit that facility in the next few minutes, and once they see we’re gone they’ll come looking. Best get out of here while you still can.” He nodded to them both, went to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and gunned the engine. They stepped out of the way and he shot off, spraying gravel and dirt as he went. They could faintly hear Spender call; _“Slow down! Jesus!”_

They watched the car go. “That was a wild night,” Mulder said at last.

“Yes, it was,” Skinner agreed.

“Alex and I decided that, uh, it’s probably better if we never speak of this again.”

Skinner nodded. “I think that’s smart.”

“Well.” Mulder clapped Skinner on the shoulder and started off for his own car. “Good luck. I hope your vaccine works. Because I do _not_ want to do anything like that ever again.”

“I hear that, Mulder, I hear that.”

**Epilogue**

The next day was Friday. Walter Skinner got up as usual, a little more tired after the events of last night, but went to work at his normal time. He put in a full day, staying as late he could get away with before going to the gym. After, he collected his take-away and drove home, mentally preparing himself for a night of silence and boredom.

He had injected himself with the vaccine last night, as soon as he had gotten home, carefully following the instructions included in the package, which contained a vial of the vaccine and a number of syringes. He didn’t feel any different, but he supposed that it had worked. He figured that he would continue supposing this until he was proved wrong.

Upstairs in his apartment, he changed out of a suit and into jeans and a sweater. He ate his meal, recycled his containers, and settled down on the couch to read a book while the television played as background noise, an attempt to drive out the silence. He would have a few drinks, he knew, but he would wait until around 9 pm to do so. He was forcing himself to start drinking later now, but to go to bed at his normal time, in an attempt to stop himself from drinking too much. It was bad enough that he was already developing a habit. Better to try and limit it before it caused too much damage.

At around 8.30 pm a knock sounded at his door. He tossed his book aside and got up to answer it, peering through the peep-hole first. He hadn’t been expecting anyone, but it occurred to him that it may have been Spender or Mulder looking to discuss what had happened the night before.

It wasn’t.

He made a surprised noise and opened the door.

Alex Krycek, still dressed in black and sporting a leather jacket, stood in the hallway outside Skinner’s apartment.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Skinner asked, almost amused at the man’s audacity.

Alex held up one finger, paused, then reached into his jacket. He pulled out a long, brown bag that clearly contained a bottle of something. He pushed the bag down to reveal a bottle of expensive scotch.

“What?” Skinner said again.

“Maybe I like-like you too,” Alex said, his voice almost shy. He held the bottle out to Skinner, who laughed and took it, feeling as though this was a surreal end to a surreal couple of weeks. He stepped back and let Alex in.


	4. Sympathy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Jackson believes he has traced Alex to New York, Mulder and Scully call on the real Alex to help find him before it's too late.

**Sympathy**

**Prologue**

The three-month scan had gone well. Scully had lain back, her belly exposed and smeared with a thick gel, and watched the screen as her baby suddenly appeared. She’d heard Mulder make a small gasp, and then he had leaned forward, closer to the screen. His hand had tightened over hers, and she found herself smiling at his simple joy. The heartbeat, strong and rhythmical, filled her ears. She had to swallow past a lump in her throat when it burst into life in the clean, sterile room. She felt her eyes fill with tears.

The image on the screen represented so much to her. A lifetime of longing finally fulfilled. A dream come true. A miracle: a true one this time, not a man-made one that blighted her life and left her devastated time and time again. On that screen were sleepless nights, endless feeds, diaper changes, years of worry and love and lazy Saturday mornings and Church on Sunday followed by a family meal. It was bathing and teaching how to brush teeth, and get dressed, and tie shoelaces. It was a first day of school that would break her heart a little, or even a lot, and the progression of a lifetime. It was sitting down in the evenings after work to help with homework, studying for exams, eventually collage and another little heartbreak.

It was everything she had ever wanted.

She loved it already, and was so afraid for it. The usual parent fears, yes, but more: fear of the world she was bringing it into, fear of what lay ahead for her and her family, fear of this being taken from her, as William had been.

Mulder turned to look at her.

“It’s a boy,” he said confidently. He turned back to the screen to marvel at the child they had created.

Her smile grew as she tore her eyes away from the screen to study his face in profile. “It’s too early to tell,” she answered.

“It’s best to wait until a little later,” the sonographer said softly, used to providing this information to eager parents. “We can book you in for another scan at from about 18 to 21 weeks, and we can tell you for sure then.”

“It’s going to be a boy,” Mulder declared, his eyes pinned to the screen. “I can feel it.”

They finished up a short time later. Mulder left the room with the sonographer: he wanted to see about getting the scan printed to a DVD as a keepsake. Alone, Scully wiped the gel from her stomach, pulled down her t-shirt, and shucked her white button-down shirt back on. She was just finishing buttoning it when she looked up, and saw a familiar face walk past the small, shuttered window.

“William,” she breathed. She froze for a moment, before getting up and hurrying to the door. She went out into the corridor. “William,” she said again, louder this time, calling to him. But nobody turned around and she could no longer see him. Not that it mattered: he could disguise himself so perfectly, projecting an image into the minds of those that looked at him, changing who they saw.

“Scully?” Mulder was behind her. “What’s wrong?”

“William,” she said again, her voice so soft that only Mulder could hear her. “I saw him.”

“Where?”

“He was here. He walked by the room.”

“He’s dead, Scully.” Mulder placed his hands on her shoulders, and caressed her gently. “I saw it happen.”

“We’ve seen so much, Mulder, and he was so special.” She frowned. “Krycek came back: maybe William did to.”

“Krycek wasn’t dead, Scully. Not completely. He didn’t come back. He was kept alive. Dana, is it possible that you imagined it? Losing William was a traumatic event, even if you were never allowed to be his mother. Guilt over the new baby could have triggered something inside your mind.”

“I’m not crazy, Mulder.”

“I’m not saying that you are. I’m saying that you’re still grieving.” He pulled her into an embrace, and she leaned against him.

“Let’s go home,” he said softly, resting his cheek against her hair. “Let’s go home now.”

**xxx**

Jackson Van De Kamp had no problem accessing Scully’s office in Our Lady of Sorrows. He had discovered he had a new little talent. Or maybe he’d always had it, but only noticed it recently. He placed his palm against the electronic lock – the kind you needed to swipe a card down to get access to the room beyond – and it beeped, flashed green, and the door automatically sprung open. He entered, left the light off, and quickly began to search for what he needed.

If anyone had the information he wanted, he knew it would be her, his birth mother.

He needed to know more about his family. The guy, the one from the motel who said he was Jackson’s father, wasn’t. It was another guy, an old man who’d had no scruples about killing his own children.

_You wouldn’t shoot your first-born son_ , William had said. _I shot my second born son_ , the old man had replied, and pulled the trigger, shooting his youngest son.

Two brothers, Jackson now knew. One was the guy from the motel, Mulder. But there was at least one more out there. Maybe even a sister. Maybe more than one sister. Maybe cousins and nephews and nieces. Maybe someone who had the ability to look out for him, to help him learn how to stay hidden from these people. To fight them.

Because it wasn’t over. Not yet. He was still having the dreams. What had been coming before his death was still coming. They couldn’t out-run it, and they couldn’t hide from it forever, but maybe they could face it head on and stop it before it was too late.

He placed his fingers gently against the sides of the laptop screen. The machine turned on and booted up straight away. Automatically, it began to search through the hospital’s file system for the information Jackson wanted. He waited, watching as files and folders were drawn up on to the monitor, opened, discarded.

And then it stopped.

Three documents were opened. Three DNA samples and analysis. Some discrepancies – different names for all their parents, no links between them at first glance – but no matter: he could figure it out later.

The printer whirred into life and soon Jackson was slipping out of the office, down the corridors, and back into the lobby. He pulled his hood up and left the hospital, disappearing into the gloomy late afternoon, unaware that he had passed within feet of his birth mother.

**Act One**

One and a half months later, and Mulder had his answer.

It was a girl.

He stared again at the screen, his face lighting up with delight. Behind him, Scully had stopped laughing.

“Serves you right,” she teased. She, too, was staring at the screen in delight. A boy would have been amazing – any baby would have been amazing – but she was happy it was a girl. With any luck, there would be no teenage motorcycles to worry herself to death about. Instead, the world of teenage pregnancy would present itself to Mulder to worry _himself_ to death about.

“I hope she gets your looks,” Mulder said.

“And my brains,” Scully added.

He glanced at her. “You’re supposed to say ‘my brain’,” he said.

“But I’m cleverer than you,” she reminded him. “Besides, one Mulder-brain is more than enough.”

She was showing now, so he helped her wipe the gel off when they were finished, and get back into her shirt and jacket.

“I’ll book some leave tomorrow,” he told her. “Just a few weeks, after the baby gets here.”

“You don’t need to do that,” she said.

“No, I want to,” he said, and she could tell by his eyes and his tone of voice that he really did. “Just a few weeks,” he continued, “to help get us settled into some kind of routine. I want us to do this properly, before you’re officially a stay-at-home mom and I go back to work.”

“You’re sure about staying on?” she asked. She couldn’t keep the worry from her voice.

He nodded. “I’m sure. I got Einstein and Miller there, don’t forget. I’ll take the more interesting cases, but honestly, they can do the grunt work.”

“You mean my job?” she asked with a small smile.

“Exactly,” he answered with a grin.

“So what you’re saying is,” she said, as he helped her down and back on her feet, “I was doing the job of two people, but only getting paid for one?”

“You should take that up with Skinner.” He held the door open for her and they went out.

She started to laugh. “Or you can doctor your expense reports. Start siphoning a little off the top.”

“Oh?” His eyes brightened. “Looking to make it with a criminal? Want to live dangerously?”

“Mulder, after the last two decades, this would be the least dangerous living we’ve done.”

**xxx**

He got into work early the next day, and phoned up to Skinner’s secretary to arrange a meeting with the AD later that morning. Then, he settled down in front of his laptop. He went to turn it on, but when he pressed the button all it did was recall the machine from sleep-mode. The screen lit up, revealing a mess of opened folders and documents.

“What the hell?” he murmured. Someone had been in his office, on his computer, and accessed his files. But they hadn’t been smart enough to clean up after themselves properly.

He began to examine what was opened.

The first number of documents were his reports on the Consortium. All had something to do with the old man, too: cases where he’d thwarted Mulder at every turn, or somehow managed to pull the rug from under him before he’d gotten too close to the truth. Next, there were the files that dealt with Jeffery Spender: his personnel file from the FBI database; a file from a case where he was the subject, undertaken during the time that Mulder was gone. And finally, all the case files relating to Alex Krycek. Again, his official personnel file, longer than Jeffery’s because it included details of his various betrayals and a long list of names he was suspected of murdering, and each file relating to the cases where he’d popped up over the years, either delivering information or just generally causing chaos.

He hadn’t updated the files to include his death. Officially, Krycek had never been murdered by Skinner: the rat had simply disappeared back into his dark hole. In actuality, as Mulder now knew, Krycek had never been murdered by Skinner.

He also hadn’t updated the files to record that Krycek had resurfaced, or his new address. Krycek would never make it to prison, if he was arrested, and Mulder still couldn’t be sure whether or not the old man had moles in the FBI. It seemed likely though: he had moles everywhere.

Mulder checked the printing log: everything to do with the old man had been printed, as well as Spender’s and Krycek’s personnel files.

Just what the hell was going on here?

He kept an eye on his watch, aware that he had a meeting with Skinner but needing to try and get to the bottom of this. He headed to the security offices, and requested to take a look at the over-night footage.

“Just the basement,” he said. “The camera that faces the elevator down there.”

“The one by your office?” the security guard asked.

“That’s the one.”

“Tell you what, I shouldn’t really be doing this, so why don’t I go have a cigarette, and accidentally leave this on-screen? You can speed up the image until you find what you’re looking for.”

Mulder gratefully slipped into the seat and began to search through the hours of tape. At first there was nothing: hours passed in peace, the corridor lying empty. Then, at about 3.30 am the elevator door slid open. Mulder stopped the fast-forward and let the recording play as normal. He watched as William stepped out of the elevator, ignoring the security camera or not aware of its presence, and went off screen as he made for Mulder’s office. About a half an hour passed before he returned, a thick sheaf of paper held in his right hand. He got back into the elevator, the doors slid shut, and he was gone.

Mulder sat back, shocked. So Scully had been right: he wasn’t dead. He got up and left the security office, pulling out his phone as he did so, and called her.

She took the news well. Well, as well as could be expected. She was silent for a short while, then asked: “What was he doing there?”

He explained about the files. He could almost imagine her, mouth open slightly as her mind began to race.

“Hang on a moment,” she said. “I’m still at work. Can I call you back?”

She hung up before he could agree, and looked at her computer. She was in her office. There had been a time, one Wednesday morning a few weeks back – the morning after her first scan, in fact, when she had thought she’d seen William in the corridor – that she’d gotten into her office and had the strangest feeling someone else had been there. She hadn’t told Mulder, but when she’d gone to turn on her computer she’d found that it was already on, a number of files and folders opened. The top three documents had been the DNA work on Mulder, Spender, and Krycek.

She checked the date, then checked her printer log, looking for that date. Sure enough: those three documents had been printed out. But the time stamp showed that she couldn’t have done it. Not only was she just finished her first prenatal scan, but by that time she and Mulder had already left the building, and were on their way back to his house, hers having been destroyed when her smart-system malfunctioned, or had tried to kill her.

She got up, stretching her back – her bump was prominent now, and she was carrying more weight than she was used to – and made her way to the security office, requesting to see the footage from the camera that monitored the space her office was located, on the date of her first scan. They provided her with a chair, and she sat down gratefully, and watched as her first born child, William, entered her office, stayed for around fifteen minutes, then left, a small sheaf of paper held in one hand.

**Act Two**

Another month and a half passed, and now Scully was seven months pregnant. They’d moved from Mulder’s small, isolated house, to a slightly larger one in Falls Church, Virginia. This made the commute easier for both of them, as Scully had no intention of giving up work until after the baby was born and she could take her maternity leave. She was in full nesting mode, and they spent their weekends getting the new nursery ready and cleaning the already pristine house from top to bottom. She also bullied Mulder into hiding his porn stash, both digital and the old DVDs and magazines, in case the new arrival accidentally stumbled across them.

“She’s a baby,” he’d said, mystified at the repeated command. “She can’t hold her head up but she can find my copy of ‘Come and Blow the Horn’?”

But he did it anyway, because it made her happy – and made her stop complaining to him about it – and stored everything in hardcopy in the back of the garage. He also began wiping his internet history every night before bed.

The passage of time was… Nice, he had to admit. And although she felt it to be more frantic and worrisome, due to the impending arrival, it was also strangely peaceful. She was happy in her work, Mulder hadn’t brought home any strange conspiracy theories, and whatever the Smoking Man had been planning seemed to have died. Her visions seemed to have stopped, although at times she thought she could feel William around her. Just a fleeting thing: no more than wishful thinking, perhaps.

At least he was alive. With the old man finally dead and gone, maybe now William could have a chance at a real life, as long as he kept his powers under control and did nothing to draw attention to himself. _If_ he could keep his powers under control.

Whatever he had been doing those times, in the Hoover Building and at Our Lady of Sorrows, was discussed frequently between them at first, but as the weeks passed and nothing seemed to come of it, it became less important. Instead, the baby took up all of their time, and when they lay in bed at night, holding each other and talking softly of the future, it was the baby that occupied their conversations: their hopes and dreams.

And then one day that changed.

Mulder was in work, slamming pencils through his poster that declared “I WANT TO BELIEVE” while Agent Einstein tore apart one of his theories regarding the nature of astral projection. Specifically, whether or not an unwanted spirit could occupy a body that had been vacated by its soul, or if (as she believed) the perpetrator of their current case was simply a regular twenty-one-year-old man who had developed schizophrenia, thus explaining the change in his nature and attitude.

Of course she was wrong, he knew.

And then his cell phone rang. He answered without checking the display, desperate for a way to get out of talking to Einstein, and heard a strangely familiar voice on the other end of the line.

“Agent Mulder?” the voice had said: the voice of a young woman, or a teenage girl. He could hear the worry and reluctance in it.

He checked the screen of his phone, and recognised the area code: Norfolk. “Sarah?” he asked carefully. William had been dragging two different girls along, so it was it a toss-up as to which it was, Sarah Turner and Brianna Stapleton. Of the two of them, it had been Sarah he’d returned to for help and companionship, so Mulder decided it was more likely to be her, if it was either of them.

“Yes, it’s Sarah. Agent Mulder, I think Jackson needs your help.”

“What do you mean? Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s going to New York. To meet some guy. A man.”

“What man?” Mulder took his feet off his desk and automatically sat straighter in his chair.

“I – I don’t know. Alex something.”

_Krycek._ Mulder could feel his blood rising. “Tell me everything.”

**xxx**

In his house on the shore of Lake Anna, Alex Krycek was painting, a cigarette clamped between his lips. He’d set up a large canvas in the back room on the ground floor. It looked out on to a long green garden that was bordered by a sparse growth of trees: a sprawling public area that the locals optimistically called ‘the forest’. It wasn’t, though, not by a long shot. Alex had seen real forests, both in North America, Europe, Russia… This was barely a corpse.

But the huge windows set into the back and side of the room, the second of which gave a beautiful view of the lake’s shore, flooded the room with natural light, and he had found that he preferred to paint by natural light than artificial. He had taken the activity up almost three years ago, when he had been in therapy for a few months. His therapist had suggested it, at first as a way to try and work through his feelings, but now it was his hobby, and he had discovered that he loved it.

He was working on a strange canvas, made up of a deep blue, almost purple, tree-like structure that spiralled out from a central point, branching over a dark black background. He was in the middle of adding flecks of crimson and green. He didn’t know why. He’d abandoned his last one, a long painting of two bulls fighting each other in a green landscape, to do this. He had an image of an abstract image of outer space clinging to his mind’s eye, and he felt as though he had to get it out as soon as possible, before he could return to the bulls. He stood a short distance away from the canvas and flicked green flecks onto the surface, hoping that they hinted at distant stars.

The sound of a car approaching the house broke his concentration, and he frowned. He bent down to place his paintbrush on the newspaper he had laid out on the bare linoleum floor, tossing his half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray he’d placed beside his feet earlier, and when he stood back up he already had a gun in his right hand. A distant part of his brain suggested that this was where the gun belonged, as though it was simply an extension of his body. He moved cautiously and silently into the living room beyond, crossed it, and approached the window that looked out on to the front of the porch. He had hung net curtains over all his windows: he could see out, but nobody could see in unless they pressed their faces right up against the glass, and by that stage it was too late for them.

He peered out, and his body barely relaxed when he saw Dana Scully pulling herself out of her front seat. Instead, a different type of tension took over his body. He was bracing himself, whether for physical attack or verbal he didn’t know, but still he braced himself.

He waited until she had climbed the porch and knocked at the door before opening it, making sure she could see his gun. In turn, he saw hers. It had been shielded by the bulk of her stomach as she had made her ponderous way to his front door. Now it was raised, and pointed at his chest.

“Put the gun down,” she said softly, her voice hoarser than he remembered. He stepped back, allowing her entrance, and placed his gun on the small sideboard that stood near the front door.

“Hands behind your head and turn around,” she continued.

He complied, silently. He felt her left hand begin to pat him down. He was wearing only a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, so it didn’t take her long to ascertain that he was now unarmed. He heard a grunt from her as her hand passed over a wet patch of paint on his left leg. To his mild irritation, she simply wiped her hand on the back of his shirt.

“Thanks,” he said sarcastically.

“Doing a bit of home decorating?”

“No,” he answered shortly, and didn’t elaborate.

“Move to the centre of the room,” she said, placing her gun in the small of his back.

He complied, moving forward into the room until she told him to stop.

“Kneel down.”

“No.” He said it quietly, with one shake of his head for emphasis.

“I said, ‘kneel down’.”

“And I said ‘no’,” he replied. “If you’re going to kill me, you’ll damn well do it while I’m on my feet.”

“I’m not here to kill you,” she said, her voice now quiet. “Not yet. Not until you tell me what I want to know.”

“And what’s that?”

“Where’s William?”

Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that. He could feel his face twist in confusion.

“What?” he asked.

“Where’s William?”

He thought for a second, his mind whirring over her odd question. “How should I know,” he said at last. “I’ve never even met the kid.”

“That’s a lie.” The accusation dropped between them like a stone.

Keeping his hands firmly planted on his head, he slowly turned to face her.

“I’m not lying.”

“You’re a liar, Krycek. And a murderer.” She held her chin firmly, confident in her pronouncements, and watched the wince cross his face. “And you’ll sell any information to anyone, no matter the hurt it causes. But I swear to you now, if you’ve sold him to the Project…”

“The Project is dead,” he said, his voice harsher than he had meant it to be. He hoped to God there was no trace of the bitterness he still felt. His whole life wasted on something that hadn’t come to pass. All those risks and sacrifices for nothing. “Your partner saw to that. The old man is gone, and the Project dies with him.”

She shook her head. “It never dies,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“Trust me, it’s dead,” he said, with more confidence than he felt. “I know the old bastard. Only he would know everything. The people around him, even the ones he claimed to trust, would only know part of the puzzle. And he would have made it so that nobody else could put the pieces together without him. It’s over, Scully: he’s dead.”

She regarded him for what felt like a lifetime, but could detect no hint of a lie in his pronouncement. Eventually she said again, in that hoarse whisper, “Where’s William?”

“I don’t know where he is,” he said again, feeling the irritation in his voice. “I don’t know what this is about, Scully. I’ve never met your son.”

“He contacted you.”

Alex frowned. “No, he didn’t.”

“Yes, he did. On social media.”

Alex raised an eyebrow and almost laughed. “I don’t have social media!”

“Liar.”

He couldn’t stop himself from rolling his eyes. He was sure now that she wouldn’t kill him, even though he couldn’t give her what she wanted, so he dropped his hands from his head. “I don’t have any social media,” he insisted. “Look around, Scully. I’m doing a pretty good job of living away from society. Why the hell would I go online and announce my presence to the world? All those sites have been hacked; data breaches released into the hands of God knows who, from Twitter to dating sites. Why would I do that to myself?”

Another car was approaching the house. They broke their standoff, both automatically looking towards the noise. When Scully looked back at Alex, he raised his right hand and cocked the gun he now held.

“Where the hell did that come from?” she demanded, taking a step back from him and aiming her gun at his head this time.

He spared her a glance, winking at her, and once more carefully approached the window. “Were you followed,” he asked her.

“No,” she said, her eyes darting from him to the front door.

“Are you sure?”

“I- I think so. No, I wasn’t followed.”

Alex again barely relaxed, but she realised his body was now entering a different type of tension. “It’s Mulder,” he said flatly. “What’s he gonna do when he gets in here?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, and he knew she was telling the truth.

He groaned. He put his head back, eyes closed, and flexed his shoulders back and forth. With a soft sigh, he went to the front door, laid his gun down beside the other one, and opened the door. Then, he moved back to the centre of the room, and placed his hands on his head. He eyed Mulder uneasily when the man entered.

Mulder also had his gun out. He raised it, and pointed it at Alex.

“I gotta say, guys,” Alex said, his voice carefully low, “I’m not enjoying being the only unarmed person in the room.”

“Does he have a gun?” Mulder asked Scully.

“I – I don’t know.”

Alex automatically turned, and let Mulder pat him down. When he was finished, Alex turned back, and tried to keep his face from showing any anger at being accosted in his own home this way. He had a fleeting regret for the amount of times he’d done this to other people, though. _It really does suck,_ he thought idly.

“Where’s William?” Mulder said, lowering his gun. Alex was under no illusions though: one false move and he’d be under that barrel again in no time.

“I don’t know,” he replied. He carefully lowered his hands, making sure to keep them away from his sides, so that neither of his unwanted guests got squirrelly and shot him, thinking he was going for yet another weapon.

“He contacted you,” Mulder began.

“He didn’t contact me,” Alex interrupted, his voice taking on a resigned air. “Like I was just telling your wife, I don’t _have_ social media. He didn’t contact me.”

“Show me your phone.”

Alex carefully pulled his phone from the right pocket of his sweatpants. He unlocked it using his fingerprint, and handed it over to Mulder. “My laptop is right there,” he added, gesturing with his head. “You can go through it too: I don’t have any social media.”

“Why not?” Mulder asked, knowing the answer before it came.

“They’re not secure.”

Mulder nodded. He went through the phone’s applications anyway, but didn’t find any hint of social media apps, with the exception of WhatsApp. He opened it and went through it, but there were very few conversations to read, and what was there was sparse. One with Jeffery Spender, he noted, but it was practically the same as the one between himself and Alex: the final message on the project they’d completed, to help Skinner. _Follow the link and meet me here tonight. Wear all black. I’ll supply the firepower._ It was followed by a link to a location on Google Maps, in Tyrrell County, North Carolina. The only other active conversation was a series of reminders from the office of a Doctor McGuire, reminding Alex that he had ‘a session booked for tomorrow, please confirm that you can attend’. Alex had confirmed each one.

Mulder nodded again, and handed the phone back.

To Scully’s surprise, he holstered his gun.

“William’s gone missing,” he told Alex.

“Mulder!” Scully said, her voice rising. “This man is dangerous, and a liar.”

“I know, Scully.” Mulder sounded like he was soothing a skittish colt. “But I believe him on this.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s him.”

“What’s going on?” Alex asked, looking from one to the other.

Mulder eyed him for long seconds, before drawing out some printed sheets of paper and handing them over. “He’s been trying to contact you.”

“Me?” Alex asked, puzzled. “Why me?” He unfolded the sheets and realised they were print-outs of screenshots of a conversation that had taken place over some social media app or another. They were between a ‘Jackson Van De Kamp’ and an ‘Alex Arntzen’. “That’s not one of my – ” he began, but stopped himself in time, flashing them a wicked grin. Now that he felt the danger had passed, his personality was beginning to reassert itself.

“One of your aliases?” Mulder said, the corners of his mouth turning up slightly. “No, it isn’t. When you went in with those terrorists, you used ‘Nicholas Arntzen’, not Alex.”

Alex’s grin widened. “Man, I played those suckers good.”

“They must be due to get out soon,” Scully muttered, unable to keep the viciousness out of her voice.

Alex raised his eyebrow at her. “Right-wing, white, Christian terrorists in America? I’m surprised The Donald hasn’t pardoned them already.” Then, he disregarded her, and read quickly through the conversation. He frowned. “This is… all wrong.”

“What is?” Mulder asked.

Alex glanced up. “Who taught this boy how to use the internet? He just goes straight into it. He gives this man every bit of information he needs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at this, he straight out says he’s looking for his older brother, that he has no family, he’s living on the street, and takes the guy at his word when he says he’s his brother. He’s just walking into a whole mess of a problem. This man could be anyone. He could _be_ anything.”

“Could he be a part of the Project?” Scully asked urgently.

Alex shook his head. “That’s the least of your worries. Dude could be an opportunistic rapist, or involved in the sex trade, and Jackson just told him that if he goes missing nobody will miss him, or report his disappearance to the cops. At least with the Project, between us we already have leads on where they may take him, but men like this… They’re underground. He disappears into that world, then you may never find him again.”

“William is… special,” Mulder said, trying to be careful not to give too much away. “If he doesn’t want to be there, he’ll get away from them. Our concern is that he doesn’t reveal his presence to anyone else.”

“That’s your concern?” Alex demanded. “That shouldn’t _be_ your concern. These men, they don’t rely on violence until it’s necessary. They rely on manipulation, and exploiting vulnerable kids. Kids who have been rejected, or suffered some kind of trauma. They seek those kids out and they prey on them, and they are _very_ good at it. They can get inside his head, and twist things, and before you know it, he’s almost brainwashed into thinking that they’re his only friend in the world. They’ll twist his loyalty. You’re both agents: you know how this works. Jackson is a vulnerable, lonely kid looking for acceptance and family. He’ll fall for this. Hell, if he’s gone to meet this guy then he’s already fallen for it.”

They looked at one another, and knew he was right. Scully sank onto the couch, and placed her hand to her forehead, hiding her face from them. Both Alex and Mulder were suddenly struck by a memory of the past: when she was still pregnant with William, and Alex had returned to give them the news of the replicants, created by God knows who at this stage, that were hunting for her and her baby.

_Here we are,_ Alex thought, _eighteen years later, give or take, and now her son is prey to a different type of predator._ He found himself feeling very sorry for her.

Alex held the pages out to Mulder. “I can’t help you,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know who this Alex Arntzen is. And there’s no address included here. He just says he’ll call with the address. I don’t suppose the person who gave you access to his accounts was able to give you an address?”

Mulder shook his head. “No. We don’t even have access to his accounts. He sent those screenshots to his old girlfriend, and she sent them on to us. She got a sleazy feeling about this Alex Arntzen too.”

Alex gestured helplessly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to help you.”

“Help us find him,” Scully said softly.

Alex shifted from foot to foot. “I can’t do that,” he said. “I don’t know how.”

“Please, Alex,” Scully said. She raised her head from her hands and looked him full in the face, her guileless blue eyes trained on his darker green ones. “I can’t go. And Mulder can’t do this alone.”

Alex closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them again, she knew that he would go. He nodded tersely. “Fine. But I’m not doing this because I owe you. Either of you. I’m doing this because this kid, Jackson, needs help.”

She nodded. “I know.”

“Alright.” He moved passed them both, and went to the still-opened door of his art studio. He pulled it closed and locked it. “I’ll go get ready, then we’ll leave.”

“I’ll get the plane tickets,” Mulder said, already flicking through his phone as he searched for planes leaving DC for New York that day.

Alex gave a short bark of amused laughter. “We’re not going by plane,” he said, as though it was the stupidest suggestion he’d ever heard.

“It’s the fastest way,” Scully said.

“Yeah, but I don’t think they’d let me bring my carry-on luggage, if you get me.” Alex shot them another wicked grin, winked at Scully, and disappeared into his bedroom. When he reappeared a short while later he was dressed in his customary black, complete with a black leather jacket that hid the gun at his waist. They couldn’t even tell he had a knife in his boot.

**Act Three**

“When did you take up painting?” Mulder asked as Alex peeled out of the driveway. They’d taken Alex’s car – he swore it would be faster than Mulder’s – and Alex was driving, although that was against Mulder’s better judgement. He didn’t feel that Alex was a good driver. As with almost everything else Alex did, he drove a car with very little consideration for the safety and wellbeing of the people and objects around him.

“First of all, we need to find this Arntzen guy,” Alex said, ignoring the question. “The girl, Sarah, she really didn’t give you an address?”

Mulder shook his head. “Jackson didn’t give her one. She told him he was putting himself in danger, and to do a bit of research on the guy first. I think they argued about it, but after that he wouldn’t reply to any of her texts or answer her calls.”

“Was he able to?”

“She said he ‘put her on read’.”

“Ouch. That’s cold, man. So he still has his phone, anyway. Where was he travelling from, and when did he leave for New York?”

“She said he was in Indiana, and that he was planning on leaving this morning.”

“How was he travelling?”

“By bus.”

Alex thought for a moment. “Ok, that’s, like, eleven hours minimum. Probably more like fourteen, fifteen, if you take into consideration the stops and whatever along the way. Do we know what time he got the bus?” He carefully took his right hand off the wheel, felt around in the pocket of his leather jacket, and took out his pack of cigarettes.

“I meant to ask, when did you start that?” Mulder asked.

“’Bout five years ago now. I was drunk. It seemed like a good idea at the time. You want one?”

“God no. I don’t know how you can stand the smell.” Mulder’s nose wrinkled as the first fumes from the cigarette floated over to him. He cracked his window a little, in an effort to stop the smell from enveloping him. “You know, cigarette smoking is responsible for almost half a million deaths per year, in this country alone.”

“You’re pulling statistics on me?” Alex said, raising an eyebrow. “Boy, go teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Now about that bus: what time did he get on it?”

“I don’t know. All he told Sarah was that he was leaving first thing this morning.”

“You got a phone?” Alex asked, pointedly. “Go check the bus schedule. Try Greyhound, and search from Indianapolis.”

“Earliest one is 6.15 am,” Mulder said. “Next one’s not ‘til 4.05 pm.”

“What is it now?” Alex checked his watch quickly. “2.15 pm. What time does the bus arrive in New York?”

“1.45 am.”

“Port Authority?”

“I think so.”

“Ok. We’ll make it in about four hours or so. Four and a half if we’re unlucky and hit bad traffic. We can be at the Port Authority a few hours early. Pick him up off the bus, and bring him back. No need to go anywhere near Arntzen. Who’s he living with out in Indiana?”

Mulder shrugged. “I don’t know. He didn’t believe that I – that Scully and I – could keep him safe. I thought he was dead. The old man… He shot him. He thought he was shooting me.”

“Screw the old man,” Alex said flatly. “The world’s a better place for his dying. Now that he’s gone, you can take the boy back, right?”

“If he’ll come.”

“Why’s he looking for me?” Alex asked the question he’d wanted to ask since reading the print-outs. “Why does he think I’m his brother?”

Mulder seemed to be thinking how best to answer. “You remember that night at the hospital?”

“When Jeff shot me? Yeah, vividly,” Alex replied pointedly.

“Scully ran your bloodwork through the system.”

“Why?”

“She wanted to make sure there were no murders with your DNA profile attached to them, that we didn’t already know about.” He looked over, sure that the information would cause irritation, and was surprised to see Alex shrug and grin.

“Can’t say that I blame her. What she find?”

“Nothing. You hadn’t lied. About that, anyway. She did find a cold case.”

“I know the one.” The grin had melted and the look Alex shot Mulder indicated that he wasn’t going to elaborate on it. “What else?”

Mulder was quiet for a few moments before replying. “She found that you shared DNA with Jeffery and me. Through the paternal line.”

Alex shook his head. “Not possible.”

“It’s true.”

“No, it isn’t,” Alex said flatly. “She must have made a mistake. Both you and Jeffery were there that night: she must have mixed my blood up with one of you.” He glanced over and saw the disbelief on Mulder’s face. “I’m telling you, Mulder, there’s no way that’s possible. The old man isn’t related to me, in any way. My parents both defected from the Soviet Union, and they left their parents behind when they did. My whole family lived in Russia, and refused to have anything to do with my parents or me. If I had any living family in America, believe me, my mother would have made use of it.”

They were quiet then, until Alex spoke again, his voice soft. “You read the cold case? Then you know what my mother was. She did that because her qualifications didn’t amount to anything over here. Neither did my father’s. He worked in the factories and she did sex work, all to support themselves and me. If they had any support over here, any other family, she wouldn’t have done that. And if the old man was my real father, she would have hit him up for child support. I’m telling you: Scully made a mistake.”

Mulder nodded, his face thoughtful. That was a possibility, he knew. But there were a few faulty points in Alex’s logic. First of all, Jeffery hadn’t been injured, so the blood sample couldn’t have come from him. Second of all, Mulder’s own DNA, had it got mixed up with Alex’s blood sample, wouldn’t have led Scully to the cold case regarding the murder of Alex’s parents. But now, he knew, wasn’t the time to raise that. Better to let Alex believe the mistake. That way, when they found William, he could sell the lie to the boy with all the certainty he had now. Because regardless of how this turned out, and regardless of the truth of Alex’s genetics, Mulder knew that he didn’t want William anywhere near Alex, and that seemed to be William’s current goal.

Better for everyone if Alex and William never discovered the connection.

“Alright,” he agreed. “She must have made a mistake.”

Alex hit a corner, and didn’t reduce his already excessive speed. Mulder braced himself against the dash and the door, wincing. “You wanna slow down? Drive like a normal person?”

_That_ received a flash of irritation from Alex. “Hey,” he said sharply. “I am driving like a normal person.”

**xxx**

They arrived in New York long before the Greyhound. With nothing else better to do, they headed for the Port Authority to wait for the bus to arrive.

They had a lot of time on their hands.

“Maybe we should try and track this Arntzen guy down anyway?” Alex suggested when he came back in from his fifth cigarette. “Try and get an address for him.”

“How? Do you have a secret Facebook account you’re not telling me about?”

“Hell no! I’d feel more secure if I stuck my genitals into a faulty blender. But we can search for him without having an account, right?”

That was wrong: anyone with that name they came across had their profile locked down tightly.

“Make an account,” Mulder said.

“Go ahead,” Alex replied.

“No, you do it.”

“I told you, I’m not going to do it!”

“You don’t have to use your real name. Make a fake person.”

Alex rolled his eyes, took out his phone, and set about doing exactly that. “Am I male or female?” he asked.

“Male. No, female. Would you think twice about getting a friend request from a hot woman?”

“Who says I’m hot.” Alex shot him a grin. “I was thinking about uglying this up a bit.”

“Why?”

“Too obvious if it’s a brand new, hot-chick profile. Looks too much like a bot or a catfish. Name?”

“Uhh, I don’t know. What about… Jamie Lee Coitus?”

Alex laughed. “No, it’s too obviously fake. What about… Faye Corgasm?”

Now it was Mulder’s turn to laugh. “Sure. Why not.”

Alex created the profile, leaving the photo blank. “I’m just going to delete it later, so what’s the point?” he asked. Once they had an account set up, they went back to searching for ‘Alex Arntzen’. They found him quickly enough: only one of the search results with that name lived in New York. But no area was specified. They also couldn’t see anything except a truncated list of his friends, and the few scanty details he’d bothered to fill in on his ‘about’ page, none of which was very useful. He didn’t even have a profile picture, just a picture of a truck.

The profile itself was locked down, but they scrolled down his wall anyway. Mostly, the only updates they could see were the various frames that had been added to the picture of the truck: a ‘Support our Troops’ one, a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ one, a declaration that the man had voted, another one supporting Donald Trump. Eventually, though, they hit something from a few years back: a picture that had been posted on someone else’s page, but tagged ‘Alex Arntzen’ as the subject.

The man named Alex Arntzen was middle aged, and distinctly average looking. His hair seemed to be a light brown, or a dark blond colour. He wasn’t excessively fat, nor was he rail thin. He was wearing a non-descript navy blue jacket that had been zipped up, and he was smiling at the camera that had taken the photograph. He was outside. There were buildings behind him, and – behind them – other buildings reared up and dominated the skyline.

“There,” Alex said thoughtfully. He clicked into the picture and made it bigger. “You see those red towers? That’s Farragut House, I think.”

“Where’s that?”

“Vinegar Hill, over in Brooklyn.”

“So he’s in Brooklyn.”

“Do a Google search for his name, but add Brooklyn to it. If there’s ever been anything written about this man, we might be able to narrow down the area more.”

“Vinegar Hill,” Mulder confirmed. “He’s on the website for a local school, HS 430. They gave him a school service award for his work with the kids there.”

“Inner city? Kids at risk?”

Mulder nodded. “Seems like it.”

Alex chewed at his lip. “I really don’t like the vibes I’m getting from this guy.”

“Me either. You got access to the dark web?”

“No.” Alex shook his head. “These days I stay away from anything that’ll get me put on a watch list. What are you thinking?”

“Would he make a post about William? Offer him around?”

Alex shuddered. “Jesus. I didn’t even think about that. I don’t know. Maybe? Might be worth keeping an eye on the skeezy message boards. Can you do that?”

“I’m an FBI agent: monitoring these things is part of the job.”

“Rather you than me. What about trying to find an address for him? Can you do that, as an FBI agent? Call a few of the local law enforcement offices and see if they have an address for him?”

“Is it likely?” Mulder asked. “His name doesn’t come up connected to any kind of crime, either as victim or perp. I can call back to the office, get either Einstein or Miller to see if they can get an address.”

Alex snorted with laughter. “Einstein?”

“Yeah.” Mulder could feel the smile playing about his own lips. “She’s a young agent. Red hair. Medical doctor. Total sceptic.”

Alex laughed aloud. “Man, Skinner really enjoys messing with you, doesn’t he?”

“I think so. Her partner is another young agent, name of Miller. Tall guy, dark hair. Real open to the possibility of the supernatural.”

Alex dipped his head to the side, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Well, maybe Skinner really enjoys messing with his own head. Seems like he got your replacements all lined up. I suppose the big guy would feel like his days were empty if he didn’t have at least two unconventional agents annoying the ever-loving hell out of him.”

“You’re suggesting that Skinner is a masochist?”

“I would rather not contemplate that. But,” he added, “rather that, than a sadist. Could you imagine Skinner whipping your ass?”

“I would rather not contemplate that,” Mulder replied.

**xxx**

“You ever hear of the Jersey Devil?” Mulder asked, a few hours later. Time was creeping slowly by, and it was a surprise to him that they didn’t have any difficulties in filling it.

“Of course,” Alex replied. “The Leeds Devil. First sighted in the early 1800s, by Stephen Decatur, so the story says. He fired a cannon ball at it, but it didn’t have any effect. Why?”

“No reason. Just, if we get finished up here early, we could always “ –

“I’m not going to Jersey, Mulder. Get _that_ thought out of your head. Nothing good happens in Jersey, trust me.”

“I found the Jersey Devil,” Mulder confided.

“I know. I read that X File. Your conclusion was a feral child, all grown up. But even then, that’s highly unlikely.”

“Unlikely?” Mulder sat up straight in his uncomfortable chair, scandalized at the accusation. “Do you think that it’s more likely it was a flying monster-devil?”

“No, I didn’t say that,” Alex said patiently. “I think it’s more likely that the story originated from the minds of the settlers. The area was predominantly English and the Brits love a good bogeyman. Plus, at the time of the first sighting, the area was a common haunt of highway men. It was dangerous to use those roads, especially alone and especially at night. I think it’s more likely that the story itself began as a way of rationalizing the fear felt by the settlers, and frightening children and more vulnerable members of their society to stay off the roads at night, or to travel in larger groups.”

“I _saw_ her,” Mulder pointed out.

“I get that, I do. But simply because there was a feral child living in the area doesn’t automatically mean it was the Jersey Devil, nor that it was the progeny of a family of feral people that had lived in the area since the early 1800’s. That makes no sense. How did the family continue the line so long without becoming genetically inbred? Or, if they were taking young girls as breeding stock, then over the centuries a pattern would have been established.”

“A pattern _was_ established!”

“No, it wasn’t,” Alex insisted. “Any kind of predator taking a specific target, time and again, for almost two hundred years, in one small – yes, Mulder, small – area, a clearly defined area, is going to be noticed. You know it would. Look at Tooms. You thought you were the first to notice the cycle, but you weren’t. Others before you had also come to the same conclusion you had, and had identified Tooms as the predator. I think it is more likely that the appearance of a feral person, in the area, during the 90’s, was entirely coincidental. And you applied the label of ‘Jersey Devil’ to that woman, due to the pre-existence of the story.”

Mulder shook his head. “You are unbelievable. You know that? I know that case, and I’m not going to be schooled on it by you of all people.”

“If you don’t want to know what I think, don’t ask for my opinion. I’m going out for a smoke.”

**xxx**

1 am rolled around slowly.

“…but he recanted,” Alex was saying. “How can you possibly base your argument on such a faulty premiss?”

“Because it wasn’t just him,” Mulder said, his tone of voice insistent. “Over the years a lot more people have come forward and told their stories.”

“Yes, but the fact that the monster is now a tourist attraction, and part of the local economy, may provide an answer as to why the hoax is being continued.” Alex’s voice had lost its patient tone at this stage. “It pays to have a local monster on hand. People travel to see stuff like that, if they’re in the area. It brings in extra tourist dollars.”

“So what you’re saying is, since the 19th century a whole town has colluded to create a hoax creature, and somehow nobody let the secret slip? They all, generations of people, have remained completely silent on the fact that they’re conning millions of people out of a few bucks?” Mulder asked sarcastically.

“No, they didn’t keep it quiet. He outright said that he made up –“ Alex took a deep breath and raised his hands to his face. He pressed his fingers his temples. “I honestly can’t keep talking to you about this. You’re infuriating! I have new respect for Scully.”

“Next you’re going to tell me that Nessie isn’t real.”

_“Nessie is not real!”_ Alex balled his fists as he half turned on his chair to face Mulder. He took a deep breath, realising he had come perilously close to shouting the statement. “Oh my God, just… please stop, Mulder.”

“It’s amazing,” Mulder continued, ignoring the outburst, “that you can believe in aliens and ghosts, but not cryptids. How do you account for such a huge disparity in your own belief systems?”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe in cryptids, I’m saying I don’t believe in cryptids that live in close proximity to centres of human settlement, and have never left even a single shred of solid evidence! Especially in the days of smart phones and cameras in everybody’s pocket. I’m saying that, with the way we have treated the environment, and the erosion of natural areas, not to mention the destruction of whole ecosystems which, like it or not, ripple out to effect the ecosystems of larger organisms, it is highly unlikely that –“

“Here’s the bus,” Mulder interrupted. He got up and walked away. Behind him, Alex rolled his eyes and let out a huff of relief that the conversation had finally ended. _Thank God!_ he mouthed, before getting up to follow Mulder.

They lingered in view of the doors, eyeing the disembarking passengers carefully as they waited to catch sight of Jackson. But when the crowd thinned, and the last few stragglers were pulling their luggage from the hold, it became obvious that they’d somehow missed him.

“He may have recognised me,” Mulder said in a low voice.

“So? He would have had to walk past us to get out,” Alex reminded him.

Mulder sighed and decided to give Alex a bit more information. He didn’t like doing it: Alex always had the habit of turning information into money, and the less people knew about Jackson and his abilities the better.

“He’s able to change how he looks,” he admitted. “It’s like he can project an image into your head, and influence how you perceive him to look.”

“So… like a shapeshifter?” Alex asked suspiciously.

“No. He physically doesn’t change shape at all. If you looked at him on a video recording, you’d see him as he is. But when he’s standing in front of you, he’s able to trick you into thinking that you’re looking at, and speaking to, someone completely different. It’s why the old man shot him: he thought he was shooting me, not William. William made him think he was looking at me.”

Alex closed his eyes briefly. “Jesus,” he muttered. “This just gets better and better. So you’re saying that he could have got off that bus and walked straight by us? And we would never have known?”

Mulder shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice thoughtful. “That’s not what happened, is it? He’s looking for you. If he had got off that bus, and saw you, there would have been no need for him to walk away. He would have just approached you.”

“How does he know what I look like?”

“He, uh, broke into my office a while back, and got a look at your personnel file. It included a picture of you. You would have been younger in it, but it still looks like you.”

Alex nodded. “So he was never on the bus?”

“I guess not. Find out if there were any other services leaving Indianapolis this morning. I want to go talk with the driver, find out if William got off early for any reason.” He was thinking about another time he had been chasing William: the boy had scared the hell out of a truck driver he’d hitched a ride with, seemingly out of fun or the desire to scare the old man. However, his nagging feeling that William had somehow drawn attention to himself on the bus was dispelled on talking with the driver.

“They stopped at George Washington Bridge first,” he said, when he returned to Alex. “A couple people got off there. He’s not sure, but he thinks William may have been one of them.”

“Mulder, that must have been twenty minutes ago,” Alex warned. “We’re not likely to find him unless we know where he’s going. Anything back from Einstein yet?”

“Not yet. She was working a case when I called. She said she’d get back to me as soon as she could.”

“Jesus, she’s leaving it late. Come on, we’ll drive over to the bridge. There’s less people around, so we might get lucky and spot him on the street. If he’s on foot, it’ll take him about an hour to get to Vinegar Hill.”

**xxx**

They drove in silence. Mercifully, Alex kept to the speed limit. They reached the bridge in less than twenty minutes, and struck out towards Brooklyn. Mulder kept his eyes trained on the streets around them, hoping for some sign of William. But although there were few pedestrians out, he still didn’t see anyone.

“If you have any contacts,” Mulder said at last, as they reached Front Street, “now would be a good time to mention it.” He heard Alex breathe out heavily through his nose.

“You accusing me of something?” Alex asked, his voice neutral.

“No,” Mulder said, keeping his own tone neutral. “But you have a criminal history. If you’ve ever come across anyone who would… know this man, I’d appreciate it if you told me.”

Alex was quiet for a short while. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft and he kept his eyes straight ahead on the road. “I may know someone. The Syndicate would use… procurers.” He couldn’t keep the disgust from his voice when he said that word. “They would sometimes put… temptation in the way of powerful men and women. You understand?” He glanced over to see Mulder’s silent nod. “It was a way of gaining blackmail material. Leverage. You scratch our back, and we’ll keep your dirty little secret. I wasn’t really involved in that side of it. I never had the talent or the stomach for it. I preferred to get my leverage in other ways.”

“The nanotechnology?” Mulder realised.

“The power of life and death over someone is a hell of a drug,” Alex agreed gravely. “Thank God I kicked that addiction.” He turned, and pointed the car towards Brownsville.

**xxx**

“When will Alex be back?” Jackson asked. He had gotten off the bus at the George Washington Bridge, as he had been told, and was met by a stranger who introduced himself as ‘John’, and said he was Alex’s roommate.

“He got called into work last minute,” John had said jovially as he led Jackson to a waiting car. “I said I’d pick you up. It can be dangerous here after dark.” He’d driven them back to a smart row of houses on Hudson Avenue, and invited Jackson inside one. He’d shown Jackson the spare room he’d be staying in, encouraging him to leave his backpack there, before inviting him down to the kitchen for something to eat.

Now, full up and feeling tired, Jackson was eager to meet with the elusive Alex Krycek. Finding him on Facebook, even under a fake name, had been a stroke of luck. What he’d read about the man, a former FBI agent turned assassin, a double agent working every side of the tangled conspiracy Mulder had been tracking, had ignited his interest. Here, possibly, was someone who could help him. He’d disappeared in the early 2000’s, but didn’t figure in any of the new case files relating to the old man and his project, so Jackson had guessed that Alex had gone to ground for some reason, and probably wouldn’t be involved with the new project the old man had created.

He hoped.

_Screw it,_ he’d thought, when he was making his initial contact with Alex, _even if he is, I can get away from him. I can kill him easier than he can kill me. And my instincts are pretty good when it comes to figuring out who’s good and who’s not._

“I’m sure he won’t be too much longer,” John replied. “You look exhausted, Jackson. Why don’t you head to bed?”

Jackson shook his head. “No, I want to wait up and meet Alex.”

John smiled broadly. “Sounds fair to me. You want a drink?”

“Got anything strong?” Jackson asked, not seriously expecting John to serve him anything stronger than a coffee.

“Sure do. Vodka ok for you?” John got up and busied himself over by the kitchen counter. His back to Jackson, he pulled a bottle of generic vodka down from a press, got a glass, and set to making the drink. “You want it mixed with cola, maybe?”

“Sure.” Jackson sat up straighter, unable to believe his luck. “Thanks!”

“No problem,” John said happily, as he emptied a small plastic pouch of white powder into the glass. “No problem at all.”

**xxx**

They pulled up outside a towering apartment building in Brownsville. The whole area was squalid, and Mulder could see prostitutes and drug dealers openly flogging their goods. Alex ignored everything, and led him into the building itself. They took the stairs – Alex didn’t bother trying the elevator: it would have been stupidly optimistic to imagine the city housing authority servicing anything in this neighbourhood – and bounded up four storeys. Mulder hung back a little, following Alex, who seemed to know exactly where he was going.

They stopped outside one of the doors, and Mulder saw that Alex had to steel himself before knocking. “God, I hate this guy,” he muttered, but banged his fist on the door.

Mulder wasn’t expecting the door to be opened by a very elderly man dragging a canister of oxygen behind him. Neither was the elderly man expecting Alex to barrel straight through the door, knocking it wide open as he pinned the old man to the wall with his left hand. A gun had appeared in his right, the barrel shoved into the old man’s stomach. Mulder hurried inside after them, closing the door over so that the tableau wouldn’t draw attention from any curious neighbours.

“Alex,” he hissed.

“Alright, you old bastard,” Alex said to the old man, his teeth bared, “you tell me what I want to know and you have a chance of still being alive when I leave.”

“Alex,” the old man choked out, “how good to see you again.”

Mulder could see that Alex was exerting a tremendous amount of strain on himself to not pull the trigger. He also admired the old man’s bravado in the face of an angry Alex Krycek.

“Alex,” he warned again. “Let him breathe.”

Alex pulled back his left arm, but left the gun in the old man’s gut.

“What information do you need?” the old man asked as he tried to muster some dignity, and drag his bathrobe back closed. He worked one handed: his other fiddled with the oxygen tank, a nervous tic, Mulder thought.

“Someone like you,” Alex said softly. “In Brooklyn. Over in Vinegar Hill. I need to find him.”

“You have a name?”

“Don’t test me, old man. You animals all know each other. You all sniff each other out, recognising each other for the monsters you are. You know who I mean.”

“There are a number of men in the city,” the old man said with a shrug.

“Arntzen,” Alex said reluctantly, and the old man laughed softly.

“Yes. Such a good joke, no? It was a favourite alias of yours, wasn’t it?”

“Cut the crap and give me an address.”

“I don’t really know him very well,” the old man said in an off-hand manner. Mulder saw Alex’s face contort with anger.

“If you’re waiting for payment,” he bit out, “the only thing you’ll get from me is a bullet.” Alex moved the gun up until it was between the old man’s eyes. “Now give me that address.”

The old man nodded, looking resentful. “Fine.” He gave an address on Hudson Avenue, and Mulder quickly tapped it into his phone, calling up directions from Google Maps. According to the information displayed on his phone, it would take another hour to get there.

“Come on, Alex,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He watched as Alex managed to get himself back under some sort of control.

“I tell you this,” Alex said, his voice low. He was still addressing the old man. “You call that son of a bitch and tell him we’re coming, I’ll come back here. You understand?”

The old man nodded. “I understand.”

“If he gets even a single hint that we’re looking for him, you’ll pay for it,” Alex promised. He finally turned away from the old man and followed Mulder out of the door.

“You trust him not to contact Arntzen?” Mulder asked.

“I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “If you want, I can go back in there and put a bullet in him. Make sure that he keeps quiet.”

Mulder shook his head. “Too risky. Someone might hear and call the cops. Let’s just get over there and find William.”

**xxx**

They found the house easily enough. Alex parked down the street, so as not to alert Arntzen that they were there.

“How do you want to do this?” he asked.

“I’m going to the front door,” Mulder replied. He checked that his gun was cocked and ready to do. “You able to go around back, get in that way? I’ll keep him distracted.”

Alex nodded. “Got it. Give me five minutes, then knock.”

Mulder did exactly that. He waited, outside, hidden in the darkness a few doors down, until his watch told him that Alex should have been in position, then approached the house and knocked. When nobody answered, he did it again, banging at the wood with the heel of his hand and making more noise than before. It was now almost 4 am, and the noise was loud on the quiet street.

He could hear someone cursing behind the door, just before it was pulled open a crack. A security chain had been put on it, and the man who answered did not look as though he’d been pulled out of bed. He was still fully dressed, minus his shoes.

“What do you want?” the man snapped.

Mulder held up his badge, his gun hidden down at his side. “FBI,” he said. “I’m looking for someone called Alex Arntzen.”

“He’s not home,” the man said, before going to close the door. Mulder quickly put his foot in it, and ignored the man’s curse.

“I think you know him,” Mulder said. “You’re Alex Arntzen, aren’t you?”

“My name is John. Alex is my roommate. He’s at work.”

“Does Alex have a brother?” Mulder asked. Although he had heard nothing, he could see a shadow shifting around behind the man now: Alex had gained entry.

“No, he’s an only child,” the man said. “Look, he’s in work right now. Come back tomorrow and –“ he stopped speaking suddenly, a look of fear flashing over his face.

“Take one step back,” Mulder heard Alex say. The man complied. Alex reached out with his left hand, closing the door over so that he could slip the security chain off, and opened it wider to admit Mulder.

“Face the wall,” Alex told the man, who did so. “Hands on it. High. Good. Stay like that. Don’t worry about me, pal, I’m right here.” Alex took a step back from the man, his gun against the small of his back. “Go find the boy,” he added to Mulder.

Mulder did that, heading deeper into the house. He searched downstairs, but could see that the rooms were empty, then went upstairs. He could hear the man, Arntzen he presumed, starting to babble.

_“- don’t know the kid, I just gave him a lift and let him have a bed to sleep in, swear to God I never touched him, swear to God I never did – “_

Mulder found William passed out in a small box room that was dominated by a huge wardrobe at the end of a single bed. He tried to rouse him, but he couldn’t. William was breathing, though, and when Mulder checked his eyes he could see that his pupils were like pinpoints: he’d been given something to knock him out. He hefted the boy up, over his shoulder into a fireman’s lift, and started back down the stairs.

_“- please, just take him and go, I swear I never did anything like this, just trying to be a good neighbour, help him out – “_

Alex saw Mulder coming down the stairs. He stepped out of the way, opening the front door wide so that Mulder could get out. Outside, Mulder turned back, but Alex was already closing the door.

“I’ll just be a second,” Alex said, his voice flat and his face expressionless.

Mulder thought about it. He was still a law enforcement official. There were a million reasons why he should go back inside that house and stop Alex. But he didn’t. If they called this in, then William would be exposed. Without William, there would be no case, and if there was no case then Arntzen walked free. And if they called it in, then Alex would be in danger of losing his freedom and, despite everything, Mulder didn’t think he could do that to the man after getting his help.

Besides, what did Arntzen matter in the greater scheme of things? Better to let Alex deal with it. Better to remove the stain of Arntzen’s existence from the neighbourhoods he frequented, and the schools he had managed to work in. Better for everyone all round.

He turned away, and carried William back to the car. When the gunshot came, he barely heard it. It could easily have been a car back-firing a few streets over. _Must have muffled the gun with a cushion, maybe,_ he thought. He didn’t care though. He already knew he wouldn’t ask.

**xxx**

Jackson Van De Kamp started to wake up just outside of Virginia. It took a few minutes for his head to stop spinning, but he soon realised he was in a car that was driving. He was also listening to the strangest conversation he had ever heard. He lay in silence, trying to figure out who was speaking. He thought he recognised one voice to be Fox Mulder, but the other one was a mystery to him.

“ – totally absurd. The sheer breadth of the evidence, the eyewitness accounts, the photographs, the length of time Nessie spans… all this speaks in favour of her existence.”

“Oh my God, seriously? Mulder, you are looking at it totally the wrong way. Nothing happens in a vacuum.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, look at the wider picture when these sightings have been reported. Let’s start with the famous Surgeon’s Picture. When was that taken?”

“1933.”

“1933, right. And was there anything going on during 1933?”

“I – I don’t know! Probably lots of things.” The voice of Fox Mulder sounded amused.

“You’re damn right, lots of things! For a start, it’s the year Hitler took power.”

“If you’re going to say the war –“

“The lead in to the war was a time of huge turmoil in human history. In 1933 you have the Reichstag being burned down, Dachau being built, Japan leaving the League of Nations, the Gestapo being founded, the first boycotts of Jewish businesses in Germany –“

“What does that have to do with Scotland?”

“Nothing happens in a vacuum,” the strange voice insisted. “Scotland is part of Britain, and the Empire is on its last legs. It’s failing. They’re already lost the Republic of Ireland following the events of 1916, and Europe is only now starting to recover from the first world war. People are on edge; the whole of Europe is watching events unfurl and can see another war coming. Appeasement may be the official line, but they are appeasing because they’re trying to forestall another war. But that’s not all. Books, movies, radio shows: all are starting to utilize the trope of a hidden cryptid, or prehistoric creature alive and well in the modern world. _King Kong_ was released in 1933, and took the world by storm. _Kong_ ignited the imaginations of people all over the world. Copy-cat films, books using the same kind of plot device, even radio serials – “

“But the first report of Nessie was in the 500s, Alex. You can’t tell me that Adamnán was inspired by _King Kong.”_

“That’s not what I’m saying,” the voice that belonged to Alex replied. “What else do you know about Adamnán of Iona? The guy created the legal code called the Law of Innocents, extending the earlier ‘Patrick’s Law’ to include women and children, along with clerics and monks, as illegal targets during warfare. Again, he lives in a time when war and death are common-place and – “

“Alex?” Jackson said aloud, as his brain started to wake up fully. He struggled upright and focused on the two men in the front seats of the car. Mulder was in the passenger seat. The driver, from what Jackson could see when the man briefly glanced back, was slightly younger, with dark hair and green eyes. “I was looking for you.”

“Lot of people look for me,” Alex replied. His voice had lost the animation it had when he had been speaking to Mulder. Now it was flat. He concentrated on the road ahead of them.

“Who was that other guy? He said he was your roommate.”

“Never met that man in my life,” said Alex. He glanced at Mulder.

“That man was Alex Arntzen, and he wasn’t really Alex Krycek,” Mulder explained. “He was someone who… wanted to take advantage of a kid with no family. No support. Nobody who would come looking if the kid disappeared.”

“Jesus.” Jackson passed a hand over his face, and raked it back through his hair. “Oh God, I’ve been so stupid,” he realised. “Sarah was right.”

“Yes, she was.”

“I was so sure. _So_ sure. I honestly thought it was Alex, and I thought I’d be able to get away if it went bad. What did he do to me? I don’t remember anything. He gave me a drink, then there’s nothing.”

“He must have slipped you something to knock you out,” Mulder said. “You’ve been unconscious for a few hours now. We’re almost back in Virginia.”

“Where’s the guy?” Jackson asked. He saw Mulder and Alex exchange a dark look.

“Don’t worry about it,” Alex said shortly. They’d left no evidence, and he didn’t expect it to come back on either him or Mulder. After all, besides from Arntzen and the old creep, they hadn’t been around anyone in New York, and only Scully knew they had gone in the first place. He even doubted that the bus driver would be able to pull Mulder out of a line-up in a few days. Too many faces passed that man on a daily basis for one to stick out.

“So what happens now?” Jackson asked.

Alex stayed quiet: that was firmly up to Mulder, Scully, and Jackson himself.

**Prologue**

It was Scully who called, eventually. It was about two weeks after their jaunt to New York. As far as Alex knew, after they’d gotten back to Virginia Mulder had been able to convince the boy, Jackson, that the old man was gone, the project was in ruins, and that it was safer for Jackson to stop running alone. He had been persuaded to move in with Mulder and Scully, temporarily at least, to see if he could stand to live with them until such a time as he could live by himself.

Alex, on the other hand, had walked away, and settled back into his own life. He wasn’t bothered at all by the death of Arntzen, but it gnawed at him that he’d let the other old man, the procurer, live. He had a vague idea that there would be another trip to New York in his future, eventually, and once again he would leave no witnesses. A simple, quiet act that would, perhaps, exorcise some demons from Alex’s own past.

When he answered the phone, he could tell by Scully’s voice that she hadn’t wanted to call him. She kept it quiet, modulated, so that her anger and disgust at having to speak to him again wouldn’t show through.

She hadn’t called to thank him.

Instead, she’d called with a request. Would he speak to Jackson? The boy wouldn’t drop it: was convinced that Alex was his brother. Wasn’t, Alex suspected, happy with the idea that Mulder and Spender were his only male relatives. Would Alex talk to him, and explain that it was a mistake?

He’d agreed to do it. It kept things simpler, and he had an idea that Jackson was, above all else, not a simple person. With any luck, he hoped that this final denial would keep Jackson away, and add an extra buffer between Alex and the parts of his old life that he wanted to shrug off.

He met them at a diner. It was a bright, non-descript franchise that sold fries and burgers and shakes, where the staff wouldn’t have time to remember the faces of those that passed through the doors. He arrived early, and they found him at a booth along the right-hand wall, facing the door. An untouched plate of fries sat in front of him. Mulder nodded, gave him a small smile that fell from his face quickly, and slid into the booth opposite Alex. Jackson took the seat beside Mulder while Scully, her face carefully neutral, took a chair from a nearby table and moved it over, on Jackson’s other side. Her belly was now too big to allow her to easily get in and out of the booth itself.

She noticed, of course, when she was fetching the chair, that Walter Skinner sat at the window along the left-hand side of the room. He seemed to be completely ignoring the meeting that was taking place, absorbed instead with a newspaper and his own plate of food. She wondered if he was there to conduct his own meeting with Alex Krycek. She hoped it would hurt.

But out of the four at the booth, only Jackson seemed happy to be there. Alex radiated nervous energy, Mulder was uncomfortable, while Scully was able to keep a lid on her distaste with admirable control.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Jackson said. “I was kind of out of it the last time… you know. On the way back from New York.” He was leaning eagerly on the table, his eyes trained on Alex’s face. Alex simply nodded in return, so after a few long moments of silence Jackson went on.

“I know you’re my brother,” he stated. “And I know this is a weird situation, but I think you’re the only one who can help me. You know what’s chasing me, because you’ve been a part of it, and you’ve been hunted by it. You’ve managed to survive, to live for so long because you’re good at it. If you could help me, teach me how to do it, I’d stand a better chance when they come back. Plus,” he added, and Alex could tell by how Jackson’s eyes dropped to the table, that this was the bigger admission. “I wouldn’t mind getting to know you. You seem kind of cool. I mean, I only read the files about you, but some of the stuff you did… you know. It was cool.”

Alex sat back and took a breath. “There was a mistake,” he said at last, his voice soft. “It wasn’t my DNA that ended up in that test. No, Jackson, listen to me. I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear, and I get it, I really do. Adopted, looking for your place in the world, looking for a family. But it’s not me. Jeffery and Mulder – Fox – they really are your half-brothers. They’re both his sons. I know they’re total nerds” –

“Hey,” said Mulder in a hurt voice.

“- but believe me, they’re better than me. You can trust them. You can rely on them. I’m not like that. I can’t help you. I can’t teach you anything. They can, though. They’ve been doing the same as me, but without all the major screw ups I’ve made along the way. Their way is better than mine. Please, believe me when I say that.”

Jackson shook his head. “Their way isn’t the best way to do it.”

“Their way is the best way for _you_ to do it,” Alex insisted, his voice still gentle. “You do it my way, and you’ll leave so much chaos and death behind that you will end up like me: alone and full of regrets. And shame. I’m not your brother, Jackson, but you have two that are willing to help you. Don’t squander that gift.”

“How do you know there was a mistake with the DNA?” Jackson asked.

“Because… there were two sons of Carl Busch-Spender in the room that night. It’s more likely that the sample came from one of them. I had parents, Jackson. I had a mother and a father. There used to be photos of my mother, pregnant with me, and baby photos after I was born.” Alex leaned forward slightly. “My parents were terrible people. My dad was a monster, and my mom was literally a crack whore. Believe me, Jackson, if I could claim any other family than them, I would do it. If there was a chance that I’m not related to either of those monumental screw ups, I’d take it with both hands. But it’s not possible. For a start, your father really didn’t like me a whole lot. He tried to kill me a bunch of times.”

“He tried to kill all of his sons,” Jackson said loudly. He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest, his face defiant. “Bitch, you’re not special.”

Neither Krycek nor Mulder couldn’t supress a laugh at that.

“That’s true,” Mulder said. “You gotta give him that one.”

“Ok, so that’s a good point,” Alex agreed. He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “But it still doesn’t change the fact that he’s not my father. Jackson, you’re looking for the right thing, but in the wrong place. Take the support that’s being offered to you. Believe me, it’s better than anything I can give you. You’ve found your place in the world now. Don’t be like me and mess it up.”

Jackson sat back and stared at Alex for a few minutes. His face was shrewd. Eventually, as though he had decided something to himself, he shrugged. “Ok,” he said. “I’ll drop it.”

Alex nodded. “I think you’ve made the right choice.”

“But you’ll understand soon,” Jackson nodded. “You’ll figure it out. I’ve seen it.”

Alex looked confused. “Huh?” He looked at Mulder for clarification, but Mulder just shrugged.

“I don’t know, he says he gets visions.”

Alex shook his head. “Jesus, you guys really know how to pork. What’s the next one? The Second Coming of Christ?”

“Naw,” said Jackson as he got up. “The next one’s pretty normal.”

Alex watched them leave. He had the feeling that Mulder had wanted to linger, but one look at Scully’s tense body language saw him trailing out after her and Jackson. Alex sat back and gave a sigh of relief. From the corner of his eye, he saw Walter getting up and approaching the booth.

**xxx**

They were half-way to the car when Scully turned back. She made a vague excuse about wanting to use the bathroom, but it had occurred to her that they had left without saying anything to Skinner. She wanted to remind the man that it would be better for his soul and his conscience if he didn’t commit murder that night. He would have her sympathy, however if he did. She also wanted to remind him that, this time, he should burn the body afterwards.

She was waddling, she knew, but the size of her belly now made it impossible to move in any other way. She even needed Mulder to help her put her shoes on, and take them off again. It would have been humiliating, if it wasn’t Mulder. Luckily, he thought it was hilarious, and waxed lyrical about her toes in a way that always made her laugh, and sometimes made her horny. Happily, he could be counted on to remedy that situation too.

She neared the front door of the diner, and paused, her hand on the handle. She felt her mouth drop open. Inside, Skinner had, indeed, gone straight to Krycek. But there was no hint of violence in his posture, and no hint of being threatened in Alex’s. Alex was resting his chin in the cradle of his left hand. His right, which was on the table beside him, was covered in Skinner’s left hand. Skinner was helping himself to Alex’s fries. He said something, and Alex’s face brightened as he laughed.

Scully drew back, feeling strange to have seen such a scene of simple intimacy. The type of tableau any two people in a relationship would create. _Damn it,_ she thought to herself. She turned away, and made her way slowly back to the car. She didn’t think she’d mention it to Mulder. It was still hard to know how he felt about Alex, and she didn’t want to see him commit murder over such a son of a bitch either.

Still, he would have her sympathy if he did.


	5. How Patterson-Gimlin Ruined the Weekend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Much to Alex's disgust, Mulder insists on some Bigfoot Hunting before the baby arrives.   
> Includes scenes of established MSR.

**How Patterson-Gimlin Ruined the Weekend**

**Prologue**

They’d picked him up about eight hours after the attack. It was Miller who had finally tracked him: from the site of the attack just outside of Ligonier to a dump of a motel outside of Raleigh, in North Carolina. He’d been able to ID the car from the stills sent in to the tip line from the motel’s owner, and as he and Einstein had been nearby they’d been able to divert their route and head straight to the motel to pick him up. Thankfully, he had been taken without much resistance – Einstein said he’d been babbling and agitated, but not violent – and the baby was safe and sound.

The parents were another story. They’d been found shortly after the carjacking, on the Lincoln Highway. She had already died and it didn’t look too good for him, either. He was on life support until his own parents could reach the hospital and make some hard decisions. While that happened, Miller and Einstein had brought the suspect back to the city for interrogation. But it was starting to get late now: it was already dark, and not being able to get a translator had become a huge stumbling block.

It was a Friday night in August, and it seemed that everyone was either on a summer vacation or had checked out for the weekend. Nobody was answering their phone, and Mulder was getting annoyed. The suspect, who they _thought_ was called ‘Motya’, was easily speaking. In fact, he seemed desperate to speak. It was finding someone who could _help_ him speak, or at least translate what he was saying with some degree of competency, that was the hard part.

They’d even resorted to Google translate, but it hadn’t gone well. All that had come back from ‘Motya’ was garbled pidgin English and, judging by the confusion on the suspect’s face, Mulder had a feeling their attempts to translate English into Russian were just as poor.

There was only one option, and as much as he knew he shouldn’t be doing this – it was against all regulations, and very risky for a number of other reasons – he bit the bullet and made a phone call.

Alex Krycek picked up on the third ring. “Hello?” His voice sounded cautious.

“Where are you?” Mulder asked, without any preamble.

A slight pause. “I’m in the city. Why?”

“I need you to do something for me. I need something translated from Russian. Can you come meet me?”

“Now? No.”

“What do you mean, no?” Mulder said. “You owe me.”

“I can’t do it. I got something on.”

“What, you got a date or something?”

Another slight pause. “Yes.”

“You liar! Get your ass down here, it won’t take long.” Mulder gave him the address of the station house.

“Fine. I’ll meet you there. This better not take long though.”

**Act One**

It took another half an hour, but eventually a cab pulled up outside the building and Krycek got out. Mulder, who was waiting just outside the front door, went down the steps to meet him, and brought him up to speed on what was happening.

“Car jacking outside of Ligonier, in Pennsylvania. Two adults in the car, shot during the course of the robbery.”

“Jesus.” Alex grimaced. “They still alive?”

Mulder shook his head. “Wife died at the scene, and we just got word that the male vic had his life support turned off. Even better, they had their baby in the car with them. Suspect took off with it.”

“Seriously? Deliberate kidnapping?”

“We don’t know. Seems like our suspect only speaks Russian we haven’t been able to interview him yet.”

They were in the elevator heading up to the interrogation rooms. “Jesus, Mulder, I can’t be here,” Krycek said. “There’s certain protocol to follow: you know that. Anything he says in there may end up being totally inadmissible.”

Mulder shook his head. “We have his DNA at the scene; we have his fingerprints and DNA in the car; we have his gun, which ballistics will match to the bullets taken from the victims; we have footage from the motel he ended up in of him parking the car and taking the baby into the room. We have enough without this interview. I can book him afterwards and interview him properly on Monday.”

“Then why do you need me?” Alex asked with a frown as the elevator doors slid back open.

“Because of this.” Mulder took a clear plastic evidence bag out of the inner pocket of his jacket and shook it open, taking a folded piece of paper out. They stepped out of the elevator and he handed the page to Alex, eyeing his face to gauge his reaction.

Alex took one look at it and burst out laughing.

It was a crudely drawn sketch of what appeared to be Bigfoot.

Alex looked at Mulder’s serious face and got his laughter under control. “You’re actually serious about this?”

Mulder nodded, and Alex snorted.

“The guy just killed two people and _this_ is your concern?”

“The area that he jacked the car in is one of the biggest hotspots for sightings of sasquatch. Pennsylvania itself is third in Bigfoot sightings, just behind Washington State and California.”

“So what?” Alex shrugged, folded the paper up and handed it back. “Guy’s probably just yanking your chain.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, to divert attention from the fact that he just killed two people and stole a baby? Is he claiming this thing stole his gun and shot them instead? He had to take the car and the baby to save it from Bigfoot?”

“We don’t know what he’s saying because we haven’t been able to talk to him. That’s why you’re here.”

“Yeah, and that’s why I’m leaving.” Alex turned to go. “Drag my ass all the way in here for this nonsense. I got plans, Mulder.”

Mulder noticed how he was dressed for the first time. Krycek was, certainly, dressed as though for a date, with black trousers and a stylish dark grey shirt, under what looked to be a very expensive black wool coat. “Wait, you’ve actually got a date tonight?” Mulder asked, surprised.

“Yeah,” said Alex. “So what?”

“So… so nothing. This won’t take long. Honestly. Ask him some questions, get his answers, and you’ll be out in plenty of time for your date. Where are you going?”

Alex sniffed. “Minibar,” he said.

“Damn!” Mulder was impressed. “I guess murder for hire paid well.”

Alex looked modest. “I made bank.”

“And I’ll overlook it if you do this for me.”

Alex heaved a dramatic sigh. “Fine,” he said, “but this better not take long. And do me a favour, when you’re writing up your report don’t mention me. Say you used Google translate or something like that.”

“We tried that, actually. It didn’t work too well.”

“Yeah, it’s hilariously awful.”

Mulder brought Krycek into the interrogation room. It was already cleared of personnel. The only person in there was the suspect, a youngish, dishevelled man who looked as though he could have been anything from his mid-twenties to his mid-thirties, depending on how generous one was. Alex quickly lapsed into Russian, introducing himself and Mulder.

“What’s his name?” Mulder asked.

“Motya Turgenev.”

“Where’s he from?”

“A place called Samara. It’s in the Volga Federal District. He’s a long way from home.”

“Forget about that.” Mulder pulled the crude sketch of Bigfoot out and slid it over to Turgenev. “Ask him about this creature.”

Alex sighed. “Fine.” He switched back to Russian and said something.

Turgenev was expansive in his reply, gesturing often, stabbing at the picture and at one stage holding his hands above his head, as though conveying height. Alex interrupted now and then, clarifying a few things before Turgenev finished speaking. Alex rolled his eyes and turned back to Mulder.

“Guy’s nuts,” he declared. “He’s definitely yanking your chain.”

“What did he say?” Mulder insisted.

“He said he was walking in the woods when that thing attacked him. Came running at him from the trees, making a weird noise that scared the hell out of him. He ran, it chased him, right the way back to the road. He jumped in front of the car, but it didn’t look like it was going to stop, so he pulled out his gun and started shooting. Swears he was just trying to scare off the monster. When the car finally did stop, he didn’t realise the couple were dead. He just pulled them out – Jesus, Mulder you can’t seriously believe this! There’s holes in his story big enough to drive a dump truck through!”

“I know. But I’m not concerned about that right now. There’s nothing we can do officially until we get a sanctioned translator down here. I just want you to focus on the part of his story that concerns this creature.”

“Oh my God, this is insane. Ok, fine. But you do not ever tell Walter Skinner I was here, right? Because when he’s done killing you, he’ll probably kill me, and I have gone to _great_ lengths to still be alive. I have no intention of dying now. Anyway, whatever. He says he pulled the adults out of the car, even though they were probably covered in blood, without realising he’d shot them and killed at least one of them. He didn’t notice the baby in the backseat, who, I’m guessing, slept through a monster attack and a load of gun fire. Or so we’re supposed to believe. He took off, trying to put some distance between himself and the monster. He didn’t realise he’d killed anyone, and he didn’t realise he’d kidnapped a baby.”

“Did he say what it looked like?”

“He says it looked like that,” Alex said, gesturing to the drawing. “And that it was big. Easily close to eight feet tall, if not more.”

“If I show him the area on a map, can he show me where he first encountered the creature?”

“This guy is fresh off the boat, Mulder. I doubt he knows the area well enough. But you can try if you want.”

Alex explained what Mulder was asking for, and Turgenev nodded. Using Mulder’s phone, he tried to pinpoint the area he claimed to have first encountered the creature. Mulder nodded, and got up to leave. Alex followed him out.

“Ok, I’m out of here,” Alex said as soon as the door was closed on Turgenev. “Good luck with your suspect, and good luck with your Bigfoot.”

“Not yet,” Mulder said. “I want to go out there tomorrow, and I want you to come with me.”

“Hell no,” Alex said flatly. “Not happening.”

“The investigation here is stalled until Monday at the latest, and I’m not even the arresting officer,” Mulder continued.

“I don’t care.”

“I can leave Einstein and Miller here, to work the official end of the investigation, while we go out to Legonier and trek out to the initial site.”

“No. No way.”

“We’ll check around for signs of what he claims happened – if he’s telling the truth then there will be clear signs of a struggle, a chase… footprints, maybe even hair or DNA evidence.”

“Please stop talking to me.”

“Scully needs my car this weekend, though. Hers is in the shop. You’ll have to swing by my place tomorrow morning and pick me up. Make it early, so we have enough time to get out to the site before dark.”

They reached the elevator again. Alex turned to Mulder.

“No! Absolutely not! I’m not spending the weekend traipsing through the woods just because you have a hard-on for Bigfoot!” Alex cried. He lowered his voice as several people looked around at them. “Mulder, you have a baby on the way. Surely you have something better to do with your time than this nonsense?”

“Not really,” Mulder admitted. “Nursery is all done; baby clothes are bought; crib; car seat; bassinet; even a store of diapers. Scully’s organized as hell,” he added, admiringly.

“Then, I don’t know, spend time with her. You’re going to be really busy really soon. Take her somewhere nice and get her pregnant ass pampered or whatever.”

Mulder shook his head. “She gave me this weekend, Alex. This is the last weekend I can go squatching for God knows how long. I don’t want to waste it.”

“Sq… Squatching?” Alex looked at him, incredulous. “Squatching? This insanity has a _name?”_

“Of course. Cryptozoologists go squatching all the time. I know you’re close-minded” –

“The hell I am! I’m open to anything _sane._ This isn’t it.”

The elevator arrived, and they got on.

“I didn’t want to do this,” Mulder said as the doors slid closed, “but you owe me. You owe me a lot. And I’m going to call in a debt for this.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. There’s a lot on the list, Alex. You know it as well as I do.” Mulder pulled another, smaller piece of paper out of his pocket. It looked as though it had come from his official notepad. He waved it vaguely at Alex.

“Oh my God, you actually made a list?” Alex almost laughed at the idea. “Are you kidding me right now? Show me.”

“No.”

“Show me the damn list!” Alex snatched it from Mulder and began reading.

“No,” he said flatly. “No way. You don’t get to put Augustus Cole on this. That man had a gun.”

“There was no gun, Alex,” Mulder said wearily. “I’ve already explained this to you…”

“I don’t care. You agreed that he made me see a gun in his hand. That doesn’t count. He was trying to commit suicide by cop. That name comes off this list.” Alex continued reading. Mulder could hear him quietly going through the list, and checking off the events.

“’Scully’s abduction’, ok that’s fair enough. ‘Murdered Duane Barry and hindered the investigation into Scully’s abduction’, you got any evidence of that?”

“No, the Navy wouldn’t release the toxicology report. But you know as well as I do that you poisoned that man.”

Alex shrugged. “I’ll give it to you. ‘Murdered my dad’… I mean, he wasn’t really” –

“You do _not_ get to dispute that one,” Mulder said hotly. “Genetics, shmenetics, that man raised me.”

“He also started the Project and sold out your sister and countless others,” Alex pointed out. “Ok! Ok!” He held his hands up in surrender. “I killed him. I’m sorry about that. I know it caused you a lot a pain, and in retrospect I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Who ordered it?” Mulder asked.

“Who do you think? The old man. Let’s see… ‘Killed Melissa Scully’… Technically, I didn’t. I mean, I was there, but… You know what,” he added, catching sight of the look on Mulder’s face, “we can leave that on the list too. ‘Stole the DAT tape’, ok, ‘Got us sent to…’ Oh _hell_ no!” Alex looked up again, his face darkening with anger. “You’re blaming that on me?”

“Hmm? Which one?” Mulder asked, feigning ignorance. He had only just remembered how badly Alex had come off in regards to one of the items on the list.

“Tunguska.”

“I mean…”

“Seriously? Well, first of all, _you_ were the one who dragged us out there. You didn’t even tell me where we were going. Second of all, I didn’t get you sent to gulag, you got us _both_ thrown into that hell hole.”

“You left me there! You got out and you left me there!”

“No, I got out and I was working on getting you out too. If you’d have had just a _little_ bit of patience, we both could have walked out of there in one piece.”

“It didn’t look like you were doing much to get me out.”

Krycek exploded suddenly. _“They cut off my freaking arm! No anaesthetic! In the middle of the goddamn forest they held me down and they cut off my arm!”_

The elevator doors slid open again, depositing them on the ground floor. Mulder’s stomach lurched: Walter Skinner, as though magically called up by Alex’s earlier warning, was standing look at them both, his face confused.

“Is everything alright?” Skinner asked.

“Yes, sir,” Mulder said quickly.

“No, it’s not alright!” Alex declared. “Have you got a pen I can borrow real quick?”

They stepped out of the elevator, and Alex took the pen Skinner offered. He quickly scrubbed something off the list. “You know what, Mulder? You’re a real asshole sometimes,” he muttered.

Mulder sighed, and accepted the newly amended list when Alex thrust it back at him. “So, tomorrow morning?”

“No. Go to hell. You waste your own weekend,” Alex declared.

“I’ll take something off the list,” Mulder promised. “And I won’t mention it again.”

Alex paused at that. “Forever? Like, it’s gone and done with, and you don’t throw it back in my face ever again?”

Mulder nodded. “Exactly. And you gotta admit, Tunguska aside, you kind of did a lot of crappy things to me over the years.”

“Fine. But I get to choose.”

“Not Melissa Scully or my father,” Mulder insisted. “They’re too big to waste on squatchin’.”

“Ok.” Alex looked shrewd as he thought about it for a moment. Finally he said, “My part in Scully’s abduction.”

Mulder cursed inwardly: that was also a big one. He probably could have gotten something really good in return for that one. But a deal was a deal. He rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said at last. “But I can’t guarantee the same from Scully. You probably still owe her for that. Look, just pick me up tomorrow morning. Early.”

Alex nodded. “Fine. I’ll see you then.”

He turned, and he and Skinner walked away. Together. Mulder paused before stepping back into the elevator. He watched as Skinner pulled the door open and placed his hand on Alex’s lower back to guide him through.

“I got bad news about this weekend,” Alex was saying in a low voice.

“So I gathered. Tell me over dinner: I might be able to stomach it better,” Skinner replied.

Mulder’s eyes widened, and he suddenly couldn’t wait to get home and tell Scully.

**Act Two**

Scully woke up slowly, aware of the noises around her. It sounded like a bull, or perhaps a small moose, had found its way into the large closet in the bedroom she shared with Mulder, and was attempting to pack a bag. She sat up and cleared her throat.

“Mulder?” she called, bewildered. She glanced at the clock: it was just coming up to 6.30 am on Saturday morning.

His head poked out of the closet. “Have you seen my squatchin’ suit?” he asked.

She blinked at him. “What time did you get home last night?”

“Late. You were already asleep.” He emerged from the closet and wandered over to the bed, lying down on his stomach beside her. He puckered his lips at her, and she leaned over and gave him a chaste kiss.

“Woman,” he said warningly, “your man is about to go tackle the great outdoors. I need more than that.”

“What are you doing?” she asked, bewildered. “Great outdoors? I thought I told you to go blow off some steam before the baby comes.” She was eight months pregnant now, and relieved to be in the final stretch.

“I am,” he replied, rolling off the bed again and going back to the closet. She could see, just beside the closet, his big rucksack. A rolled up sleeping bag lay on the floor beside it. “I’m goin’ squatchin’,” he added.

She sighed. “I meant go to a bar and get loaded,” she said. “Meet up with some friends. Do… something normal. It’s going to be the last chance you get for a while.”

“Exactly. And by extension, it’s going to be the last chance I get to go squatchin’.”

She rolled her eyes, but managed to stop herself from calling him dork. “Are you going by yourself?” With a groan and a small amount of effort she rolled herself to the edge of the bed, swung her feet onto the ground, and struggled upright. “I can make you some breakfast if you want.”

“Careful, Scully. Making breakfast is a short stop on the road to full housewife. Seriously, have you seen my squatchin’ suit?” He grabbed his rucksack and sleeping bag and followed her down to the kitchen.

“It’s in one of the boxes at the back of the garage. Pancakes?”

“You know it.” He paused as he began making his way out to the garage. “Wait,” he said. “I thought everything in those boxes was going to Goodwill? You were going to _give away_ my squatchin’ suit?” He looked horrified at the very idea.

“Relax, they wouldn’t take it. It comes to something, Mulder, when I can’t even give away your most prized possession.”

He retrieved it, still grumbling at her audacity, and brought it into the kitchen. She looked annoyed as he draped it carefully over the back of one of the high-backed chairs at their kitchen table.

“I hate that thing,” she muttered. “I swear I’m allergic to it. And the only animal I’m allergic to is cats.”

“What are you implying?”

She glared at him imperiously, before slowly and deliberately flipping a pancake. “You know what I’m implying. There’s a lot of little girls and elderly women who were adversely affected by the making of that suit.”

“I’m sure they’ll get over their loss.”

“So are you going alone?” Scully pottered over to set the coffee to percolate.

“No.” Mulder paused. He knew how Scully felt about Krycek. “I’m actually bringing Alex with me.”

“Krycek?!” She turned and stared at him, shocked. “What the hell are you doing going out to the middle of nowhere with that psychopath?”

“I need him to drive me there,” Mulder said. “That’s all. You need the car this weekend, remember?”

She huffed. “I can’t believe you’d go anywhere with that man. What if he kills you? I told you, Mulder, I don’t want to be a single mom. Not at my age.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, switching into flattery mode. “You’re young, you’re beautiful – smoking hot, in fact. You’re clever, you’ve got an amazing career… Even if some old millionaire doesn’t swoop in to marry you, then die and leave you everything, the baby would have everything she needs in you. Caregiver, role model… nay, dare I say it, true female inspiration and feminist superhero.”

She sniffed. “Say more nice things like that.”

“How about,” he said, sidling over to her, “I give you some _amazing_ gossip?”

“Acceptable. Proceed.” She began dishing up the pancakes. “I wonder should we wake Jackson up?” she wondered.

“He’s already up,” Mulder said, taking the plate she offered him. He grabbed cutlery from the drawer for both of them, and they went over to the kitchen table to sit down. Scully spared a final look of distain for the hairy squatchin’ suit. Taking the hint, Mulder quickly moved it, dropping it down on to the rug beside his rucksack and sleeping bag, over by the door.

“I met him when I first got up,” Mulder continued. “He said he wanted to get an early start on the job hunt.”

“I wish he’d even consider getting his G.E.D.,” Scully said wistfully. “He’s so bright. And he’d have much better luck getting a good job if he went to college.”

“Agreed, but seriously, do you want to hear my amazing gossip or not?”

“Is it that Krycek and Skinner are sleeping together?” Scully guessed.

“What!” Mulder’s mouth dropped open. “How the hell did you guess that?”

She sighed, and sliced off a piece of pancake using the side of her fork. “I saw them when you guys came back from New York. You remember we brought Jackson to talk to Krycek? And Skinner was there? When I went back, after we’d left, I saw them sitting together and kind of got the feeling.”

“Damn. And you didn’t tell me?”

“Wasn’t up to me to tell you,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not our business, it’s Walter’s.”

“Well, they were on a date last night. Krycek was all dressed up. Minibar, he said they were going to.”

“Damn,” she said, impressed. “I guess killing people pays good money.”

“That’s almost exactly what I said. That’s what I love about you, Scully: we’re on the same wavelength.”

She glanced over at this squatchin’ suit, but didn’t bother arguing the point. Instead, she said, “So they’re dating? Like, properly dating?”

“I guess so. Why?”

She winced. “I had hoped they were just screwing. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I want Walter to be happy but… Alex Krycek? Seriously?” She thought about it for a moment. “Any chance this could just be some kind of a mid-life crisis?”

“I don’t know, maybe. You can ask him when he gets here.”

“Who? Skinner?”

“No, Alex.”

Scully’s fork paused on its way towards her mouth as she turned her head and glared at him, her eyes narrowed. “Alex Krycek is coming here?”

“Yeah. He texted earlier and said he’d come pick me up just after seven. Speaking of which,” he added, glancing at his watch, “I should probably get myself together.”

“You… gave _that man_ our address?” she asked, her voice dangerous.

Mulder paused, a sudden feeling of ice-cold fear crawling up his back as he realised his mistake. “Uh, no?” he tried.

“That man knows where we live?”

“Ok, Scully, please keep calm and let me explain.”

**xxx**

It was 7.13 am when Alex pulled up outside the house. He left the car idling and dragged off his sunglasses, wincing at the bright sunshine that glinted through the windscreen. On reflection, he decided to spare his poor eyes the torment, and put the glasses back on. He was still feeling hungover from the night before, as well as a degree of self-pity at having to get up so early on a Saturday, and resentful at having to spend said Saturday tramping through a forest in search of a very not-real Bigfoot.

He looked up at the house. He was warm in the car, comfortable, and he didn’t feel up to facing Dana Scully. Instead, he put his hand on the horn and started beeping. He kept it up until the front door of the nice, suburban house flew open, and he suddenly realised his mistake.

He was, he knew now, in a lot of danger.

Scully came down the porch steps still dressed in pyjamas and slippers, her dressing gown open and flapping around her as she waddled at full speed towards him. Her left hand supported her bump as she waved the gun in her right hand at him. “You beep outside my house, you son of a bitch?” she shouted. “You beep outside _my_ house?!”

“Oh God!” He threw the car into reverse and almost backed into the neighbour’s car. “Oh dear God. Oh Jesus, take the wheel!”

A banging on his window made him jump. He turned to see Jackson’s face peering in at him. “You beeped, didn’t you?” Jackson called. “Rookie mistake. She really hates it. She says it’s disrespectful.”

But Mulder had caught up with her and was doing his best to placate her. They could still hear Scully’s voice above his though. “No, this is not my hormones. I just want to talk to him,” she was insisting. “Get out of the way, Mulder. I just want to have a conversation with him.”

“I promise you, I will deal with it,” Mulder was saying in a calming voice. “Honey, I will tell him not to beep outside the house anymore.”

“You tell him not to come back here! You tell him to lose this address! Beeping outside my house on a Saturday morning. Who does he think he is?”

Alex was only vaguely aware that the back door of his car had opened and shut, and that Jackson had got in: he was still too invested on whether or not Scully would make it past Mulder and shoot his ass dead.

But Mulder had managed to calm her. He gave her a kiss, turned her, and began leading her back towards the house. Alex breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, he turned to address Jackson. “Get out of the damn car.”

“Hell no! You just riled her up and now you expect me to deal with her all weekend? I’m going squatchin’ with you guys.”

“Go ask your mother.”

“I’m not going near her when she’s in a mood like this. Her hormones are all over the place. You go ask her.”

“Fool, get out of the damn car!”

Mulder had paused outside the front door. He gave Scully another kiss, said something to her that got a grudging smile, and grabbed his rucksack, sleeping bag and squatchin’ suit. He juggled them briefly as he turned and made his way down to the car, but managed to get them balanced correctly. At the top of the porch, Scully’s face became angry again when she noticed that Jackson was in the car.

“Hey!” she called. “Jackson! Get out of there! I don’t want you anywhere near that man!”

Mulder chucked his stuff into the backseat, practically hitting Jackson with it, as Alex pleaded with him to get out.

“Please, Jackson, I don’t want to die! Just get out of the damn car.”

“Just drive, Alex,” Mulder said as he got into the front passenger seat. “Seriously, man, get us the hell out of here.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“I’ll call her and explain. It’ll be fine. For the love of God, drive!”

Hating the whimpers that escaped his mouth as Scully got closer to the car, that gun still waving about in a manner he thought was rather reckless, Alex put his foot down. Tyres screaming in protest, they tore off down the street. Behind them, they could just make out Scully’s final shout: _“Slow down, you maniac! This is a residential area!”_

**xxx**

“Your wife is terrifying,” Alex said to Mulder.

“Yeah, she’s amazing, isn’t she?” Mulder said blissfully.

“Why does she hate you so much?” Jackson asked.

“She has her reasons,” Alex said ruefully.

“I read the files on you. Did you really kill her sister?”

“I was there.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“That’s the only answer you’re getting.”

“I’m really glad you’re interested in sasquatch hunting,” Mulder said to Jackson. “I got the impression last night, when I was telling you about it, that you were bored.”

“Yeah. No. You can just leave me at a motel, or whatever,” Jackson replied. “I just didn’t want to be left behind while Dana’s in such a rage. So, where are going?”

“It’s a place called Ligonier, in Pennsylvania,” Mulder said. “Can you dig into my rucksack for me, please? The front pocket. There should be a file in there. Thank you.”

“And Bigfoot lives up in Pennsylvania?” Jackson asked.

“Bigfoot doesn’t exist,” Alex said quickly. He had slowed down as they cut through DC, wary of drawing attention to himself. There were still a number of warrants out for his arrest, after all. Now they were back on the highway, however, he put his foot down once more.

“This again,” Mulder said with a sigh. “You still haven’t explained how you reached such a ludicrous position, considering everything you’ve seen in your life.”

“Deforestation and the destruction of natural environments,” Alex said promptly. “Over the last fifteen years huge swathes of the environments that Bigfoot supposedly lives in have been exploited, while redevelopment of that land has taken place in order to grow human habitation sites. More houses have been built right on the edge of so-called Bigfoot hunting grounds. This isn’t specific to America, or to Bigfoot. Same thing is happening all over the world: areas of natural resources and biodiversity are being destroyed and human housing then encroaches on the area.

“In every case, you see a new food chain being introduced. And I mean, in _every_ case. We now have bears walking straight into people’s yards and eating out of the trash. You got lions, hyenas, tigers, wolves… they’re all doing the same. Not just the big animals either: racoons, badgers, wild dogs, smaller wild hunting cats. In every case, the animal reacts to the destruction of his territory by adapting to the human settlement, and introducing increased scavenging to their food chain.

“Except Bigfoot. In his case, he goes further back into the wilds, into areas that he has already deemed inappropriate for his needs at some stage – if he could live deeper in the woods, or away from a natural water source, or in rocky mountains and hills, he would have done so already. But he didn’t. Those areas were already discarded at some point in his evolution. Maybe because of climate, or geographical reasons, lack of appropriate food and water, the terrain is too harsh… But now, with his own territory being destroyed, he somehow acts differently to almost every other known creature, and retreats to those inappropriate areas?

“It’s nonsense. _If_ Bigfoot exists, and _if_ he is, as is claimed, some kind of early hominid or early stage in the evolution of Homo Sapiens or Neanderthals, then he would have reached the exact same conclusion as every other animal, and adapted to close proximity of humankind.”

“I thought Bigfoot is shy?” Jackson asked.

Alex rolled his eyes. “So’s every other animal, until humans mess with it. At this stage, Bigfoot should be as acclimatised to us as every other animal that lives on our periphery. They’ll put up with us, and they’ll root in our garbage for scraps, but they don’t exactly let us pet them, you know?”

“You’re basing your beliefs on _that?”_ Mulder said.

“You don’t have to believe me,” Alex said patiently, “but I’m telling you now, there’s no such thing as Bigfoot and this is a giant waste of the weekend.”

“This whole area is a hotspot for sightings,” Mulder said. He began to rifle through his file, until he found the pages he wanted. He pulled them to the front and began reading. “In 1988 a fisherman saw a creature much larger than a gorilla. It had reddish brown fur, large orange eyes, and smelled bad. He ran back to his car and was treated to another sighting of the same creature when he turned on his headlights, before it ran back into the forest.

“A year later, in 1989, a man named Bob France and his nine-year-old son were camping down by Trout River when the boy saw a creature he described as eight feet tall, hairy and walking on two legs. His father didn’t see the creature, but he saw the movement of bushes and undergrowth as something made its way along the embankment and back into the forest.

“In 1995, a man out hunting racoons with his two dogs finds himself in a clearing. The dogs start going crazy and he spots a large ‘ape-like’ creature in a tree that manages to escape by swinging from tree to tree.

“In 1998, over in Jenner Township, just outside of Ligonier, four people were witness to audio phenomenon: screams from an unidentifiable animal or creature that lasted thirty minutes.

“In 2009, a man hiking along the trail discovers he’s being watched by a six-foot-tall creature covered in brownish red hair. The creature was calm, simply observing the hiker before turning around and walking away, down a ravine.

“There’s thousands more exactly like this, all over Pennsylvania,” Mulder concluded. “Each one has either multiple witnesses that all swear they saw the same thing, or credible single witnesses that all describe something similar to the other sightings. You might not believe in Bigfoot, but you gotta admit, there’s something up in them thar hills.”

“These sightings go back to the 1960s,” Jackson said suddenly. Alex glanced back in irritation, but Mulder grinned at him.

“Now you’re getting in the spirit!”

“No, not really,” Jackson admitted. “But there’s, like, a Google map with pins marking every Bigfoot sighting, and in Pennsylvania they seem to have begun around 1965.”

“Where’d you find that?” Mulder asked, almost crawling into the back seat in order to get a better look at Jackson’s phone.

“Come on, Mulder,” Alex complained. “I’m trying to drive here. Your big head’s getting in the way of the mirror.”

“Honestly, I just Googled it,” Jackson said as Mulder sank back into his own seat.

“You heard Gen-Z,” Alex said. “Google it.”

Mulder sighed, pulled out his glasses and his phone, and started to do exactly that. He looked over when he heard Alex’s snort of laughter. “What’s so funny?”

“What the hell are they?!”

“They’re my glasses. I didn’t bother bringing my contacts. Besides, I’m long-sighted: I find it hard to wear contacts these days.”

“You couldn’t have gotten something a bit more… stylish?”

“Style isn’t everything.”

“You look like Dame Edna’s elderly Jewish uncle.”

“I need them to see my phone,” Mulder said with great dignity, as he turned back to the screen. “Keep laughing. I’m only a few years older than you.”

Alex suddenly put on the voice of a querulous old New Yorker. _“I went to get latkes at Sal’s but he was kvetching about his hemorrhoids.”_

Mulder continued to draw upon his deep reserves of dignity, and ignored him.

_“What’s ya fax number? I want to send you a nice picture of my grandson.”_

“Will you knock it off?”

“You gotta take those things off, Mulder. I can’t even look at you.”

“Good. Keep your eyes on the road then. You can’t smoke that in here.”

“This is my car!” Alex said, outraged at the imposition.

“Yeah, but Jackson’s in the back,” Mulder pointed out.

“I don’t think I’m going to stunt his growth.”

“No, but second-hand smoke causes an estimated 41,000 deaths per year in the United States alone, and” –

“Fine! But I’m pulling over. I can’t deal with you without a cigarette.”

**xxx**

The day was long and, as Alex and Jackson had feared, interminably dull for both of them. Mulder spent the day in Bigfoot heaven, asking as many locals as possible about their experience, and taking careful note of their stories and the locations they provided. Alex had a feeling that a lot of the old timers, particularly the old men who they’d found sitting around jawing and shooting the breeze, were having Mulder on, but he left them to it. There was no point in interjecting and challenging even their most obvious B.S., because Mulder wouldn’t have appreciated it, and – to be honest – he kind of felt that they’d earned the right to bullshit tourists.

He had a brief and unfamiliar longing to live long enough to lie through his ass to tourists. It seemed like a fun pastime.

Eventually, he got bored and went back to the car with a cup of take-out coffee, to smoke far too many cigarettes and wait for Mulder to finish up. He ended up ringing Jeffery Spender, and they spent a happy half an hour making fun of Mulder’s Bigfoot hunting. Then, he rang Walter, and spent much longer talking about everything and nothing.

At long last, when his stomach was beginning to growl and the growing urge to pee had become uncomfortable, Mulder and Jackson finally returned to the car.

“That was a good day,” Mulder said, satisfied.

“Ugh, that was so boring,” Jackson said.

“Alright.” Mulder took out his printed map and began to scan it. “I vote we head out in to the woods tonight and” –

“No,” Alex said flatly. He started the car. “We’re going to find a motel, and I’m going to pee and take a shower, and then I’m going to go eat pizza. I’m starving. And I’m not spending the night in the woods.”

“But I brought a sleeping bag,” Mulder said.

“Did you remember to bring a tent? A portable gas fire for cooking? Any food or provisions?” Alex asked, pointedly. “No? Then you’re outvoted. We’re not running around in the woods all night.”

“Sasquatch is most active at dusk and dawn,” said Mulder. “We have to go out when it’s dark.”

“No, _you,_ Mulder. _You_ have to go out at dark.”

“A deal is a deal, Alex,” Mulder reminded him. “Remember what’s riding on this.”

Alex closed his eyes and cursed softly. “Fine. But not all night. I can’t do it. I’m too old to wander around the woods in the middle of the night, Mulder. You are too. Choose one: dusk or dawn.”

Mulder weighed up the pros and cons. One big con for going out at dusk was that they’d all been up since the break of dawn that morning, and would be exhausted. If they could go to a motel now, eat, and get some sleep, then he could drag Alex out a few hours before dawn, and get some night squatchin’ done too.

“Dawn,” he said at last.

“Alright, dawn,” Alex agreed.

“I don’t have to go, do I?” Jackson asked. “If I’m awake at dawn, it’s because I haven’t gone to bed yet. I don’t wake up that early.”

“Relax, Gen-Z,” Alex said. “I’ll keep Mulder occupied. You can catch up with your beauty sleep.”

**xxx**

Mulder directed them to a complete dump of a motel. It’s only saving grace was, apparently, its proximity to a number of sightings of Bigfoot. There weren’t a great deal of rooms in the motel to begin with, and by the time they’d grabbed some food and driven out there, there were considerably less. They managed to get the last two – which were positioned at the very end of the short, single story building – and were checked in before 6 pm. Alex simply strolled into one room and closed the door behind him, leaving Mulder to share with Jackson.

A situation that didn’t last for long.

At about 9.30 pm Alex heard a knock on his door. He got up from where he had been lying on the bed, propped up by the sad, flattened pillows, watching TV on his phone, and opened it cautiously to reveal Jackson.

“Fox is being a bit of a dork,” Jackson said. “Can I stay here for a while?”

“No way, Gen-Z.” Alex went to close the door, but Jackson stuck his foot into it.

“Come on, Alex, please?” he begged. “He won’t stop telling me stories about Bigfoot. Did you know he once heard one bang a stick against a tree? Because he’s told me about it. In great detail. _Twice_.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Fine. You can come in for a little while. But you’re not staying here tonight. Does he know you’re here, or did you just walk out?”

“He knows. I told him. He said ‘good luck with that’.”

“Whatever.” Alex pointed at the thin single bed that sat under the window at the front of the room. “Go there. Don’t make noise. Try not to talk to me.” He settled himself back on the slightly bigger bed on the other side of the room, and went back to his phone.

“What are you watching?” Jackson asked, as he made himself comfortable on the single bed.

Alex looked at him. “What did I just say?”

There was silence between them then, for at least three minutes, filled only by the sound of the show Alex was watching.

“Seriously, what is that?” Jackson asked, curiously. “Are those British accents? Are you British?”

Alex closed his eyes, and looked as though he was counting to ten. When he opened them again he hit pause on the screen and answered. “I’m not British. I’m watching _Downton Abbey.”_

“Oh, my mom used to love that show. My mom-mom, I mean. Like, not Dana but” –

“I know who you mean.”

“Yeah. She used to watch all the time. She never let me sit in the room with her, because she said I talked too much.”

“I bet.”

“I didn’t mind though: it was boring. Why are you watching it? No offence but you don’t strike me as the type to get into all that boring British stuff. Like the old woman. And the guy. You know the guy. He was in that film with George Clooney and the other guy.”

Alex took a deep breath. When he felt that Jackson had finally shut up, he tried to hit play again, but Jackson began to talk once more.

“So why do you watch it?”

_“Oh my God.”_

“Is there, like, a lot of action in it? Murders and stuff?”

“No.”

“So why do you like it?”

Feeling as though the only way to make the conversation stop was to answer the question, Alex did so. “I’m seeing someone who likes it. So I figured I’d give it a go.”

“You got a girlfriend?” Jackson’s face brightened. “Is she hot?”

“Who says it’s a girl?” Alex shot back.

“Oh, you got a boyfriend? That’s cool. Is he hot?”

“Jesus Christ,” Alex said weakly.

“So can I ask you something? Like, just three questions?” Jackson shifted so that he was sitting cross legged, facing Alex. Alex was still resolutely refusing to look at him. “Three questions, and you answer them honestly, and I’ll let you go back to watching your show. Just three questions.”

Alex looked over at him and narrowed his eyes. “Three questions?”

“That’s all. But you have to answer them honestly,” Jackson reminded him.

“Fine.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?” Jackson looked delighted.

“Yeah. That’s two questions answered already. Better make your last one count.”

“Aw what!” Jackson cried.

“And that’s number three.” Alex went to hit un-pause on his phone, but Jackson stopped him.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Hang on, that’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair.”

“My parents were murdered in front of me,” Jackson said, his voice suddenly harsh, “I think I know that life isn’t fair.”

“Ugh. People are using their dead parents against me a lot these days. Ok. Fine. You get a do-over. But just the last question.”

“So I get one question, and you answer it honestly? And that’s not my question,” he added hastily.

“One question. But you gotta make it a good question, or I don’t have to answer it.”

“Fine.” Jackson sat in silence for a few moments as he thought about it. “Ok,” he said at last. “I think I got a good one. You were an assassin. That’s not a question,” he added.

Alex looked at him for an uncomfortable length of time, his face inscrutable. Finally, he nodded. “I killed people sometimes,” he said.

“And you worked for the old man. Again, not a question. I read all this in those files I stole from Fox.”

Another nod.

“Ok, so, was there ever a time that you got, like, shot, or injured, or something like that, but you couldn’t go to a hospital so you had to go to a vet and get them to perform surgery on you?”

Alex looked at him, momentarily shocked into silence. Of all the things the kid could have asked, this wasn’t what he was expecting. Finally, he rolled his eyes and muttered, “Yeah.” He looked as though he was disgusted at himself for admitting it.

“Oh my God!” Jackson looked jubilant. “For real? You’re not messing with me, are you?”

“I need a smoke,” Alex said, getting up. He grabbed his jacket and headed outside.

He was able to get through half a cigarette before Jackson followed him outside. “Hey Alex,” he called.

“Oh my God, Gen-Z, what now?”

“Nothing. I mean, well, I’m kind of hungry again. Any chance we could go get something to eat?”

“We just fed you, like, five hours ago!”

“I know, but that was the first thing I’d eaten all day. And now I’m hungry again.”

“Jesus. Jesus, fine. Fine. Whatever.” Alex went to the second motel room, knocked, and opened the door. “Hey, Mulder, Jackson wants – _Oh my God!”_ He backed out of the room quickly, his hand over his eyes. “What the hell, Mulder!”

“What’s up?” Jackson asked, trying to get a glimpse into the room before Alex slammed the door shut again.

“Nothing,” Alex snapped. “I just forgot how much of a dirtbag your brother is.” He raised his voice so Mulder could hear him. “I’m taking Jackson to get some food. Put some damn pants on before we get back!”

“Alright!” Mulder called back, genially. “Bring me back something nice!”

**xxx**

Back in the car and driving again, back towards the town of Ligonier, and by now Alex was pretty sick of Saturday. “This is seriously the worst day ever,” he muttered.

“Worse than when you got your arm cut off?” Jackson asked curiously.

“At least that was over fast,” Alex replied. “Still got a couple more hours of this nonsense to get through.”

Jackson checked his phone. It was just coming up to quarter past ten. He also noticed that his cell reception was gone again, a fact he felt compelled to tell Alex about.

Alex grunted in reply.

“I hate when that happens. That never happened at home, but up here it keeps happening. Especially when I’m on roads like this. My internet doesn’t even work, and this network said that it had the most coverage around here. It’s such a pain in the ass, isn’t it?”

“What the” – Alex crushed back a curse and put his foot on the brake. Jackson looked up, did a double take, and almost dropped his phone in shock.

“Is that…?” he asked.

Together they watched a very large figure, humanoid, standing upright, walk out from the treeline on their right, cross the road in front of them, and enter the treeline opposite. Just before it disappeared from sight into the forest, it turned its head and looked at them.

“Holy crap,” Jackson said, awed. “Fox was right!”

Alex groaned. “This is not happening. This is not happening to me! What the hell did I do to deserve this? Oh, right. Never mind.” He sighed and reached over to the glovebox, and pulled out an empty pack of cigarettes. He tossed this out the window, aiming for the grass before the treeline.

“What are you doing?” Jackson asked.

“Marking the spot,” Alex replied. “Sorry, Gen-Z, but it looks like you don’t get a happy meal tonight. We gotta go back and get Mulder. Hopefully he’s finished playing with himself.”

**xxx**

He had, but Alex still waited outside the room until Mulder came out. He wasn’t risking walking into a repeat of the earlier scene he’d been subjected to.

“You guys were fast,” Mulder said.

“We saw Bigfoot,” Jackson declared proudly, grinning widely.

“What?” Mulder looked at Alex for confirmation, and received a nod. “What did it look like?”

“Big,” said Jackson.

“Taller than me,” Alex said. “At least eight feet tall. It was too dark to see the exact colouring, but from the headlights of the car it looked dark, maybe a dark brown. Eyes had kind of a green cast to them, but it was more like the way an animal’s eyes go in certain light sources, so it’s definitely a creature that has some kind of night vision. Unless it’s just a dude in a suit and the eyes are glass.”

“Gait?”

“Long steps, kind of loping.”

“Arms?”

“I mean, they sort of swung, but I wasn’t really paying too much attention to them. I was too busiy getting my preconceptions destroyed. And get this: Gen-Z had his phone in his hand and didn’t think to take a picture or video of it.”

“Come on, Jackson, get with it. Dash cam?”

“Not in my car.”

“Can you find the place again?”

“Marked it as best I could. But all I had was an old pack of smokes. You’ll have to keep an eye out for them on the side of the road. Whatever it was went into the woods just a little bit further down. We should be able to find marks or a trail, if we’re lucky enough.”

“Let me get my kit and we’ll head back out there,” Mulder said with a broad smile. “It’s squatchin’ time.”

**Act Three**

It took them three goes to find the spot again. It was so dark it was hard to spot one small cigarette pack, but when they did Mulder made sure to pick it up and hand it back to Alex, who shot him a look before tossing it back into the car. They found the part of the forest Alex thought they’d seen the creature enter, and Jackson hurried in first. It was even darker under the cover of the trees, and before he’d taken more than a few steps he found that he had to stop again. He pulled out his phone.

“Hang on,” he called back to them, “I have a flashlight on my phone. It’s not much, but it should help.” He turned it on and pointed it ahead of himself. As he did so, the area lit up much brighter than he was expecting.

“Did you hear that, Mulder?” Alex said dryly. “Gen-Z has a flashlight on his phone.”

Annoyed, Jackson turned around, and saw the two men following him in, each of them now holding a much larger, and much more powerful, flashlight in their hands. They grinned at him as they passed him by and went deeper in the forest.

They separated and began scanning the ground with their powerful beams. They worked mostly in silence as they tried to find any sign of the creature that had crossed the road in front of the car. After around ten minutes, with both of them working their way into the forest and away from the road, Alex called out to Mulder.

“I got good news and bad news,” he said.

“What is it?” Mulder asked as he clambered over some deadfall to reach Alex.

“I got two prints. But the bad news is, they’re both the same foot.” Alex stood up from where he had crouched down to examine a patch of mud. “Look.” He pointed down and Mulder went to examine the mud.

Mulder swore softly. Jackson went over and looked at the prints. There were two, one after the other, as though something had been walking there recently.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asked.

“They’re both the right foot,” Mulder said. He pointed at the curve of the instep. “You see? It means it’s not likely that a Bigfoot made these marks.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You got a right and left foot,” Alex said lazily. “This thing only has a right foot.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“It’s more likely this was made by someone who had a model of a sasquatch’s right foot,” Mulder explained. “And as he’s walking, he’s just pressing the model down in the mud to create tracks. But he only has one model, so the tracks are all the same.”

“There’s no weight distribution either,” Alex added.

“That means,” Mulder said, “that when you walk you put pressure on different parts of your foot at different times. First your heel, then the front, right? Here, it’s just been pushed down like a stamp.”

“So it’s not a real Bigfoot?”

“Doesn’t seem likely,” Mulder said with sigh.

“But we saw something,” Jackson insisted.

“Guy in a suit,” Alex said.

“Probably,” Mulder agreed.

“But it was big,” Jackson countered. “It was really tall, wasn’t it Alex?”

Alex shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe we were expecting it to be big, so our brains told our eyes that it was. Suggestion is incredibly powerful.”

“Or it was a tall person wearing a suit,” Mulder offered. “It’s dark, and you guys stopped a ways back from it. It may just have seemed taller than it was. Or,” he added thoughtfully, “there could have been stilts built into the suit, to add artificial height.”

“Well,” said Alex, “I hate to say ‘I told you so’.”

“So don’t.”

“But I’m gonna. I told you so.”

“Although that does beg the more intriguing question,” Mulder said, ignoring Alex, “of what someone’s doing out here dressed as Bigfoot.”

“Scaring up interest in the town,” Alex said at once. “Them monster tourist dollars. That’s my guess.”

“Could be. You want to go deeper? See if we can find more tracks, and whoever is responsible for this?”

“Why?” Jackson asked.

“So I can arrest him for wasting my damn Saturday.”

“Only if I don’t kill him first,” Alex said darkly.

**xxx**

They were able to follow the trail easily enough: whoever had made it hadn’t been trying to hide their passage through the trees. Every so often they would come across the fake footprints pressed carefully into muddy patches of ground, or tufts of hair that had caught on low-lying twigs and prickles in the underbrush, but also visible at points were partial prints of ordinary running shoes.

“Size 18,” Mulder said, when he spotted the first one. The size had been imprinted into the muck. “That’s a tall guy in a suit.”

“I wonder if what they say is true,” said Jackson.

“Big socks?” Alex asked, and laughed at his own joke.

“No, I meant a big pe” –

“Shh!” Mulder hissed. “You guys hear that?”

They stopped walking and quietened down. After a few seconds, Alex nodded. “I hear it,” he said in a low voice. He and Mulder snapped off their flashlights.

“Guys?” Jackson whispered, his voice uneasy. With the lights off, it was suddenly a hell of a lot darker. They were deep in the forest, and the canopy overhead was thick and lush, and blocked out any light from the stars and moon. He took a step forward, towards where he thought Mulder was, and heard something. He paused, not sure if he had simply heard himself, but the noise came again. It wasn’t loud: just a low swish as someone, or some _thing_ , moved through the forest to their right. His heart began hammering in his chest, and it was an unpleasant feeling. He had been hunted before – had spent time running from those who had hunted him – and knew what fear felt like. Since the discovery and development of his strange powers he had been confident in his ability to survive. Now, however, he realised that his fear was coming from the unknown: from his very state of not-knowing exactly what they shared the forest with. And a small part of Jackson didn’t believe that they had been lured deeper into the forest by a tall man in a hairy suit.

Whatever it was, it was moving away from them. The darkness to his left shifted, and he realised Mulder and Alex were also moving. They were going slowly, though, careful not to advertise their presence to whatever they had begun to track. Jackson swallowed, and began to follow them, trying to keep himself from brushing against the undergrowth, or stepping on a twig. It was difficult in the darkness, but somehow he managed to keep both men in sight, while keeping his own noises to a minimum.

By the time they stopped walking, perhaps half an hour later, Jackson was a short distance behind them. He could see them only as deeper shadows that flitted against the darkness between the tree trunks. Then, suddenly, they were in a small clearing, and the heavy, suffocating feeling he hadn’t even noticed began to lift, and his was able to breathe better.

“You see where he went?” Mulder murmured.

“No,” Alex replied, his voice equally quiet. Neither man had broken the treeline. Instead, they seemed to be scanning the treeline on the opposite side of the clearing. Eventually, after what seemed an interminable wait, Mulder snapped his flashlight back on, and used its light to strafe the trees opposite.

Whatever they had followed seemed to be gone. Alex likewise turned his flashlight on, but directed it to the ground. The grass here was long, but springy, and it was hard for him to pick up a trail through it. He somehow managed it though, and began to lead them to the left. They progressed slowly, considering how small the clearing was – only about twenty meters – as he lost and found the trail a number of times. Eventually, they were back in the forest, but the trees here seemed to be thinning, and the ground underfoot was becoming rocky and had taken on a slope that became steeper the further they walked. It also became harder to mask their progress as they kicked loose stones and scuffed rocks underfoot.

They broke through to another clearing, this one much smaller than the first. Again, it was empty of their quarry, but held a surprise: what appeared to be a small cave set into the sloping land.

“That must be where he went,” Alex said.

They peered into the opening. It was tall, but not very wide, and it was very dark.

“Not a typical sasquatch lair,” Mulder said. “I think we can get through it though. Might be a bit tight, but hopefully it’ll open out the further we go.” He turned his body and began to edge into the opening. He turned his head back to face them. “You guys ready?”

“Yes!” said Jackson at once.

“Nope,” Alex said, shaking his head. He took a couple of steps back. “Not doing it.”

“What’s the matter?” Mulder asked, his voice teasing. “Scared of the dark?”

“Yes,” Alex readily admitted. “And I’m claustrophobic. I’m not going in there.”

“Yeah right!” Jackson said. “Go on, Fox, we’re right behind you.”

“I’m not going in there,” Alex repeated. He took another couple of steps away.

“Are you serious?” Jackson asked, surprised. “Or are you playing right now?”

“I’m not playing. I’m not going in there.” Alex was looking tense. “I can’t do it.”

Mulder edged his way back out. “What’s the problem? You’re not really afraid of the dark, are you? _You_ of all people?”

“You wanna try getting locked into an underground silo,” Alex said darkly. “I can’t do small dark spaces anymore. It triggers something in me.”

“What does it trigger?”

“Uh, a massive freaking panic attack. You guys go on if you want to. I’ll wait here.” He took out his cigarettes and pulled one out.

“Christ, you’re such a baby,” Mulder muttered. “Fine, I’ll go in. By myself. Jackson, you stay with Alex.”

“No way! I want to see Bigfoot!”

“It’s not Bigfoot,” Alex snapped.

Mulder began squeezing back through the opening, and into the cave beyond. “I’ll be back,” he promised, and soon he was gone from sight: swallowed up by both the darkness beyond and a shallow curve in the path of the cave.

“Screw this,” said Jackson, and followed.

“Get back here,” Alex called, but Jackson didn’t bother, and Alex didn’t follow.

**xxx**

Alex was getting bored of waiting. He spent the time pacing up and down the clearing, scanning the trees around him, and listening intently for signs of anyone else approaching the cave. Eventually he took out his phone, and realised he had two bars of reception. He was surprised: he hadn’t expected anything this deep into the forest, but he supposed the fact that he was in a clearing, and was quite high up at this point, probably had something to do with it. He shrugged and checked the time: it was late, but it was Saturday night and Walter was probably either still up or not long gone to bed, so he tossed caution to the wind and rang him.

“Hey,” he said, when the phone was answered. “It’s me.”

“Hey yourself,” Walter replied pleasantly. “Having fun?”

“No. It’s awful. I’m in a forest, it’s very dark, and I’m by myself.”

“Yikes. How are you holding up?”

“Fine. At least I’m outside. The other two idiots went into a cave.”

“What cave?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask its name. So what are you up to?”

“Just about to head to bed.”

Alex grinned wickedly. “You naked? You drunk enough for phone sex?”

“No, and no. I’m sober. I guess I half expected you to call me and ask me to go up there.”

“Naw. Bad enough I wasted my weekend. You might as well enjoy yours.”

“I ended up going into the office today.”

Alex shook his head in amusement. “Last of the rebels, huh?”

“You know it. Well, it was kinda dull around here, you know?”

“Aw. You miss me?”

“Not exactly. More like I missed the chaos that comes with you. It’s like when your dog runs away, and the whole house seems quieter and empty.”

Alex thought about that for a second. “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not,” he said at last. “Anyway. I guess I better let you get to bed. That’s a long-ass week of work.”

“You sure? I don’t mind staying and talking for longer.” Walter sounded sincere.

Alex smiled. It was a much softer smile than the one he usually wore, and he was glad nobody else was around to see it. “No. You get on. I’ll call you tomorrow. Let you know when we’ll be back.”

“You staying at mine tomorrow night?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not.”

“Ok. Then I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Have a good sleep.”

“Have a good… walk through the forest?”

“Yeah, thanks.” Alex paused for a second before adding. “I like-like you.”

“I like-like you too,” Walter said promptly.

When he hung up the phone, Alex was still wearing that soft smile. He could never have predicted the direction his life had ended up turning, and it was still early days, but for now it was something to be enjoyed. He’d never really had a proper relationship before. He wasn’t even sure if this _was_ a proper relationship, this strange little dalliance with Walter. But it wasn’t like anything he’d had before, where it was purely about sex and lust, and lasted no time at all. They were still present in this relationship too, but this felt like it could last for longer, perhaps a very long time, and there was companionship and intimacy too.

They had decided to try and leave the past in the past. The slate wasn’t quite wiped clean, but it had been cleared up considerably when Alex had handed the palm-pilot for the nanobots over without being asked. And they had decided that, while not all the secrets of the past had to be dredged up and dissected, going forward they would be honest with each other. Alex had even told Walter about New York, and his actions there. He’d been bemused when Walter had insisted on extracting a promise from him not to kill again, but he had made the promise, and made it willingly. It had simply struck him as amusing that they even had to have the conversation. He didn’t think that it was a promise that had to be made in most people’s relationships.

_“Alex!”_

Alex jumped visibly, and almost dropped his phone. “What the fffff-frick?” He turned and saw that Jackson had come back, and amended his language as best he could. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me!”

“Do you have a gun?” Jackson asked.

“Yeah. Why. Doesn’t Mulder have one?”

“Yes, but he needs you.” Jackson held out his hand. “I need you to come with me.”

Alex eyed the entrance to the cave. “Uh, you wanna just take my gun back to him…?”

“No, he needs you. There’s something going on. It leads to a bunker, and there’s a lot of armed men speaking Russian in there.”

Alex groaned. “Don’t make me go in there.”

“I won’t,” Jackson promised. “Just take my hand and I promise you won’t have to go through the cave.”

Alex narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“Trust me. Please?”

Warily, Alex stretched out his hand and placed it in Jackson’s. He could just feel the squeeze of Jackson’s warmer hand before he was suddenly sucked into darkness, his chest tightening as his breath left him. Seconds later they emerged, as if by magic, in a dark room. Before Alex could open his mouth to swear a hand was pressed over his mouth and he could hear Mulder whisper in his ear, _“Stay quiet!”_ Alex quickly suppressed his shock and got himself back under control. In the gloom, he could see Jackson grinning at him.

_“What was that?”_ Alex whispered to him when Mulder removed his hand.

Jackson shot him some jazz-hands. _“Superpowers!”_ he whispered back. _“I wasn’t even outside, I was here all the time. Cool, huh?”_

_“Shhh!”_ Mulder hissed. He nudged Alex, then tugged his ear before inclining his head to the right.

They were against a wall, in the dark. The room they were in was cluttered: boxes and trunks stood around the floor and pushed up against walls, stacked two or three high. They were crouched behind a stack of two trunks against the right-hand wall. Beyond them was an opening to another room, where a dim glow could be seen, and now that he was acclimatised to his new, sudden surroundings, Alex could hear voices coming from there. The voices were low, but they were speaking in Russian. He put his finger to his lip and creeped around the stack of trunks, edging towards the door where he could better hear what was being said. He stayed there for a few minutes, listening intently, before sneaking back to them.

_“We have to get out of here,”_ he whispered.

Mulder shook his head and slowly, carefully, eased open the trunk at the top of the stack they were crouched behind. Alex peeped inside, and saw that it was filled with weapons: M2 50 Calibres stacked on top of each other and three abreast. He groaned inwardly. He leaned closer to Mulder. _“They’re talking about a deal,”_ he whispered. _“It’s going down tonight. We have to get out of here.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because.”_ Alex gestured to the room in general.

_“If they’re moving military grade weapons I have a duty to stop them,”_ Mulder pointed out.

_“By yourself? Mulder, we have to get out of here. You can call for backup and get a team out here to help you. We can’t take them by ourselves. And you can’t let Jackson get caught up in something like this. Besides the obvious, Scully would kill you.”_

Mulder looked unhappy, but eventually he nodded.

And then his phone rang.

Both Alex and Jackson, who tended to keep their phones either on silent or switched to vibrate alert, like any normal person, were confused for a moment when the theme song to an old TV show from the 90’s began to play. Loudly. Then, they stared in horror as Mulder began swatting at his pockets, trying to find which one he’d stuck his phone in. After what seemed like an eternity in the darkness, but in reality had only been about 30 seconds, Mulder found the phone and hung up on the caller. He quickly switched his phone to silent.

They held their breath, hoping that the noise hadn’t been heard by anyone else. But judging by the hushed, puzzled conversation that began, it had. Footsteps came closer to the storeroom, and they each crouched further down, and tried to blend deeper in to the shadows.

Someone – they couldn’t see who – paused in the doorway, clearly looking in. After a few minutes of total silence, whoever it was called out to his friends in Russian.

_< ”Nothing here,”> _said the voice. It was deep and masculine.

Just as the man began to move away, Jackson’s phone began to vibrate. Normally such a sound would go largely unheard, but in the silence now it _brrrr! brrrr!-_ ed loudly.

_< ”Who’s there?”> _the voice called sharply.

Alex cursed, bobbed up, and shot the man in the leg before bobbing back down again. “We gotta move,” he said.

The man had howled when the bullet hit him, but quickly regained composure and started firing back.

“Why didn’t you kill him?” Mulder asked, annoyed.

“I made a promise,” Alex replied. He began plotting their way back to the cave, using the most cover the room could supply. “No more killing.”

“Who the hell did you promise that to?!”

“Uh, the Queen of England,” Alex snapped. “Who do you think?”

“Skinner? But why the hell –” Mulder began. He broke off as three more men appeared at the doorway with guns, and a firefight began.

“It was after New York, you know?” Alex continued, conversationally. He was aiming for arms and legs, to incapacitate the threat, while Mulder was being less discerning.

“You told him about New York?” Mulder asked in disbelief. He aimed, and took out the man who had advanced the most into the room. Alex aimed carefully and shot the last man in the leg.

“Yeah, I kind of felt like I had to,” Alex admitted. “We’d already had the talk about not keeping secrets this time, so I felt like I should come clean on what happened.”

“What did he say?” Mulder asked curiously, as they hustled their way back to the exit through the cave system.

“I mean, he wasn’t pleased. But I guess he could understand why I killed Arntzen. Ugh. Do we really have to go out this way? Jackson, can’t you use your ‘superpowers’, or whatever, to get us out?”

“Not all three of us,” Jackson said doubtfully. “That was the first time I’ve done that over such a distance. I wasn’t even sure if it would work with both of us.”

“Aw man!” Alex groaned. “How long is that tunnel?”

“It’s pretty long,” Mulder said.

“How many of _them_ is there?” Alex asked, pointing back towards the door.

Mulder shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Couple of different voices though.”

“Screw it,” Alex said. “It’s not like we have a choice.” He turned away from the cave entrance.

“I mean, we kind of do,” Mulder pointed out, but he followed him anyway. Jackson trailed behind them.

Back at the door, two of the men had gone. The third was dead, and the fourth was moaning and clutching his thigh. Mulder picked up the guns that had been dropped.

“Alright, G-Man, what’s the plan?” Alex asked. He accepted one of the guns, which Mulder had held out to him, and checked how many bullets were still in the clip.

“I guess… We go out there, we find them, uh, we bring them down as best we can, and we arrest everyone who’s still alive at the end of it? Jackson, you stay behind us. If this goes south, get yourself out of here. Try not to kill anyone, either.” Mulder quickly cuffed the injured Russian, who shot a curse at them. Alex snapped something back at him, stepped around the dead man beside him, and went out into the hall, carefully checking that it was clear before gesturing to Mulder to follow him.

It was a short hallway, with a door at either end. The voices had come to the door on the right side of the hall, however, so they silently made their way to it. Standing on either side of it, with Jackson tucking himself into the corner beside Mulder, Mulder counted down from five using his fingers. When he hit zero Alex turned, kicked the door open, then quickly dodged back to the side and away from the open doorway.

Gunshots sounded and bullets whistled by them.

“How many inside?” Mulder murmured.

“I count five,” said Alex. He took a deep breath before dodging back into the line of sight and starting firing. He loosed off three shots before he was driven back to his position behind the door. This time he ducked down, and bullets slammed into the wall above his head. None broke through the thick cement. “Three now,” he added. “Well, three are still on their feet anyway.”

It was Mulder’s turn. Without thinking about what he was doing, he took up position in the doorway and began to fire. He was a little luckier: he managed four shots before being driven back. Like Alex, he adopted a crouched position, pulling Jackson down too. “One’s still up,” he said. “One is definitely dead, the other is down.”

They heard footsteps moving quickly away from them. Throwing caution to the wind they entered the room, guns held in front of them. But they had been good enough with their first assaults: the two that Mulder had hit were both dead, while the two that Alex had hit didn’t seem capable of holding their guns correctly with their injured arms. Alex quickly disarmed them while Mulder went after the runner.

“Try and find something to restrain them,” he called back over his shoulder as he went.

Beyond the room was another short hallway, but this time both it and the door were wider – wide enough for a small truck or a van to reverse into, probably for ease of loading it up with the weapons. Mulder followed his prey outside, and came out in another clearing. This one, however, was much bigger than the one the cave had stood in, and the running man had yet to reach the treeline. Mulder took careful aim and fired before he could lose site of the man in the trees. His shot was good, and the man stumbled before collapsing to the ground with a shout. Mulder heard a noise behind him and turned to see that Jackson was just coming out of the doors. He held out a plastic zip-tie.

“Alex said to give you this,” he said.

“Thanks,” Mulder replied. He took the zip-tie, went to the fallen man, and restrained him before assessing his injury. The bullet had missed the major organs, though, and the man should live. _If we can get medical help here,_ Mulder thought to himself. He hauled the man to his feet and both he and Jackson went back inside to find Alex.

**xxx**

A few minutes later, Alex went outside. He had to make a phone call. Obviously, Mulder had to call this in, but with the warrants still out for him Alex couldn’t be here when backup arrived. And it would be less believable that Mulder could have taken out so many men by himself. Also, they both figured it would be a good idea to get Jackson away from the scene before the FBI arrived. Hopefully, Walter would still be awake, and willing to carry out a bit of deception.

The phone rang for longer than normal before he picked up.

“Skinner,” he said, already coming on the alert.

“Hey!” Alex said brightly. “Uh, what’ya doing?”

“I’m in bed, Alex. What’s the problem?”

“Ok, so it turns out Bigfoot doesn’t exist.”

“Were you expecting it to?”

“Who, me? No. But I guess Mulder’s pretty bummed. Anyway, you wanna know what is real?”

“Go on,” Walter said cautiously.

“Funny story. So there’s, like… I guess they’re terrorists? I mean, we didn’t really ask too many questions. But there’s a gang of Russians up here dealing military grade weapons, so we took them down. I didn’t kill anyone,” Alex quickly added. “Mulder did, but I was shooting to wound. But there’s still, like, four of them here, alive, plus a bunch of weapons.”

“Oh Christ,” Walter said softly. “Alex, you can’t be there.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling you. How fast can you get out here? And, um, any chance you can pretend you were here with Mulder instead of me?” Alex winced and waited. He thought he could hear the quiet sounds of Walter getting out of bed.

“I’m on my way,” Walter said tersely.

“Thank you,” Alex said gratefully. “Oh, and I like-like you,” he added.

Walter sighed. “I like-like you too,” he said grudgingly.

Alex smiled that same soft smile as they hung up.

**Epilogue**

Alex and Jackson headed back to the motel room when Walter showed up a few hours later. Jackson seemed exhausted and, happily, less inclined towards conversation than he had been previously. Once they made it back, he crawled onto the single bed in Alex’s room and fell straight asleep. Alex, meanwhile, dimmed the lights considerably and waited near the window, peeping out and on the alert as he waited for Mulder and Walter to finish up. About fifteen minutes after they had entered the hotel the road outside suddenly lit up with police cars and sirens, all rushing in the direction Alex and Jackson had just come from.

It was 6.30 am by the time Walter and Mulder made it back to the motel. The sun was already coming up, and it was promising to be another sunny late August day. As soon as Walter parked his car in the parking lot, Alex slipped out of the door and lit a cigarette.

“Jackson’s asleep,” he said in a low voice. “What happened?”

“They bought it,” Walter said. “This your room?”

“Yeah. Mulder’s is next door.”

Walter nodded and went in, gesturing for Mulder to follow him. Alex stayed outside and continued smoking.

“How’d you get up here?” Walter asked, careful to keep his voice down so that he didn’t disturb the sleeping Jackson.

“Alex drove,” Mulder replied.

Walter nodded. “I think it would be a good idea if you took Jackson home now. I’ll stick around here, and figure everything out with the locals. The collar is yours, though.”

“Sir, I can’t leave. I don’t have my car, remember?”

“Go get Alex’s keys and drive his car back to yours. I’ll drop him off tomorrow, and he can pick it up then. Uh, so the room next door is empty, right?”

“Yes sir,” said Mulder, keeping his face straight. “A man could make a lot of noise if he wanted to.”

“Go home, agent, and get some sleep.”

Mulder shook Jackson awake, and led him outside. Alex was leaning up against the wall of the motel, just finishing his cigarette.

“I need your car keys,” Mulder said to him.

Alex frowned. “Why?”

“Skinner said that I should take Jackson home, and that you’d lend me your car.”

Alex looked annoyed. “Oh he did, did he?”

“Yeah. He was more concerned with finding out how much noise he can get away with making.”

Alex grinned wickedly and pitched the cigarette butt. He dug in his pocket and pulled out his keys, tossing them to Mulder. “Have a safe drive, losers,” he said, as he breezed by them and into the room, closing the door in their faces.

“So did we see Bigfoot or not?” Jackson asked as they got into Alex’s car. “Or was it a guy in a suit?”

“I don’t know.” Mulder started the car and began the drive home.

“And what about the first guy? The Russian guy who stole the car and the baby?”

“I’m sure we’ll know more when we can conduct a proper interrogation with the whole crew. But I’m guessing he was running from them, not Bigfoot, when he carjacked the victims and killed them. As for whether they’re responsible for the tracks, as a way of keeping people away from their set-up, I’ll know more once the interrogations start. But it seems likely.” Mulder grimaced. “Or else it really was just a local trying to drum up tourist dollars.”

“Why was your boss concerned about noise?” Jackson asked suddenly.

Mulder started to laugh. “Never mind.”

“Wait,” Jackson said, frowning. “Are Alex and Mr Skinner sleeping in the same room?” His face brightened. “Is Alex sleeping with your boss?! I gotta say, that’s one hell of a power move!”

“Tell me about it,” Mulder agreed.


End file.
